First Grade - Curriculum Overview
Reading
Development of comprehension strategies continues, as picture books, easy readers, and beginning chapter books provide opportunities for students to share text-to-text and self-to-text connections. Buddy reading, guided reading, and oral reading experiences strengthen reading fluency, and students learn to select "just right books" for independent reading.
Genre studies focus on memoir, non-fiction and poetry. Studying authors, such as Brian Wildsmith, provides a model as students write and illustrate their own stories. Phonemic awareness skills are taught through individual, mini-and whole class lessons.
Writing
Daily writing experiences in first grade continue to build students' confidence and ability to communicate as writers. Touchstone texts provide inspiration, and students share their writing in small groups. Regular publishing provides a wider audience for writing. First graders build their vocabulary using word lists, acquire spelling strategies, and learn the spelling of frequently used words. Regular handwriting practice continues.
Mathematics
Continuing to tie math to real-life situations and other classroom studies, first-graders explore math concepts of compensation and equivalency using a double-decker bus model.
Children investigate multiplication while playing dice games and building multiplication arrays. Number sense is strengthened as students put together and take apart numbers to 100 as well as count by 2s, 5s, and 10s. They begin to solve double-digit addition problems, use non-standard units to measure length and weight, and identify and compare geometric shapes. Building a variety of strategies and articulating mathematical thinking is encouraged.
Social Studies
The concept of community grows as students examine Berkwood Hedge, our immediate neighborhood, the Bay Area, and the larger world. They begin to develop an understanding of interconnections, and their own personal roles and responsibilities as members of various communities, including the natural world. Studying the contributions made by Henry David Thoreau and Rachel Carson, children examine and create maps of the various communities they study. As stewards of their own classroom and schoolyard, first graders provide school leadership for clean-up and recycling projects.
Science
Life Science:
- Five Senses
- Life Cycles (Insects, Amphibians)
- Animal Predator/ Prey Relationships
- Birds
- Animal Adaptations
- Food Chains & Food Webs
- Trees
Earth Science:
- Weather
- Rocks
Physical Science:
- Matter: Solids, Liquids & Gases