Grade 1

List of 11 items.

• Art

  All art classes utilize the elements of art of line, color, shape, texture, space, and form. A variety of media is explored through the year including markers, crayons, stencils, oil pastels, and clay. Students study Madhurani art and artist Patrick Guyton. Special emphasis is placed on creating art that tells a story about life experiences.   

• Math

  •Computation: Use learned strategies to solve addition and subtraction problems within 100.

  •Operations: Understand place value and use place value to add and subtract.

  •Measurement: Understand the basics of measurement using nonstandard units to measure lengths. Tell time to the hour and half hour. Count coins using pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters.

  •Data: Interpret basic data sets using pictographs and bar graphs.

  •Problem Solving: Solve word problems with multiple steps.

• Music

  The first-grade music program emphasizes vocal, instrumental, and movement development. Students focus on proper rhythm and instrument technique using their voices and the Orff instruments. Emphasis is placed on melody, pitch, rhythm and meter.  Students begin to compare differing musical elements from contrasting songs.   First grade performs several times a year in our fall and spring musical concerts and in a whole-class mini musical staged with movement and song.   

• Phonics

  •Phonological Awareness: Blend spoken sounds together. Isolate the beginning, middle, and final sounds of a spoken word. Segment a spoken word into its individual sounds.

  •Phonics and Word Recognition: Know and use the sound-spelling correspondence for consonants, short vowels, digraphs (ex. th), common vowel teams, final –e words, and inflectional endings.

• Physical Education

  Movement and exercise are an important part of the school day. All grade levels have Physical Education three days a week. Physical Education classes develop fitness and skills and focus on life-long health and wellness.  In grade 1 students focus on foot skills, balance, and how to effectively strike objects.  Hand eye coordination and balance and rhythm are emphasized. 

• Reading

  •Key Ideas and Details: Ask and answer questions about a text. retell stories, describe characters, and explain major events in a story. Identify the main topic of text and retell key details. Describe connections between the text and oneself, another text, or to a global concept or topic.

  •Craft and Structure: Explain the difference between books that tell stories and books that provide information.

  •Integration of Knowledge and Ideas: Use illustrations, diagrams, and photographs to describe key ideas from the text.

  •Fluency: Read a text with purpose, understanding, appropriate pacing, phrasing, and expression. Self-correct when a word recognition error is made.

• Research Lab

  The Lower School Library is a place of discovery.  All Lower School students visit the library regularly and can explore their interests by delving further into books and online sources for deeper learning.  During Research Lab class, students learn a variety of research, technology, and digital citizenship skills.  In first grade, some examples of specific units and topics include: beginner level research skills, fiction vs nonfiction, strategies for book selection, understanding nonfiction text features, using a variety of apps and websites for content creation, distinguishing between facts and opinions, and basic internet safety.  Of course, students also enjoy reading for pleasure and look forward to checking out books to enjoy at home. 

• Science

  Topics of study: Science Cycles, Light and Sound, The Human Body, Animals, Oceans, Rocks and Minerals, Dinosaurs, Earth’s Moon, States of Matter, Electricity

• Social and Emotional Learning

  All homeroom teachers start the day with a morning meeting, which builds community and sets students up for a successful day. These morning meetings include four components and are based on the Responsive Classroom best-practices: 1) greeting everyone by name, 2) sharing important information about our lives and listening actively to our peers while asking clarifying questions, 3) a brief activity around social-emotional learning, and 4) watching community announcements and reading a short message that reviews the schedule for the day.    
     
  In addition, to morning meeting, all homerooms include a “Social Emotional Learning” block in the schedule in which students actively learn and practice a core set of social and emotional competencies: “C.A.R.E.S.: cooperation, assertiveness, responsibility, empathy, and self-control.   

   

  Our Lower School counselor visits each class once per week for a focused SEL lesson as well.    

• Social Studies

  Topics of study: Geography, Friendship, Communities, History Around the World, Early US History, and Holidays Around the World

• Writing

  •Text Types and Purposes: Write opinion pieces to share an opinion on a topic and reason for the option. Write an informational text to introduce a topic and provide some facts about the topic. Write a narrative text in which they retell two or more evens of the story.

  •Language: Print all capital and lower-case letters. Capitalize dates and names of people. Use end punctuation for sentences. Use conventional spelling for commonly used words.

  •Production and Distribution of Writing: With guidance, work through the writing process to edit, revise, and publish a piece of writing.