First Grade Curriculum Guide
The Catholic School is a unique faith-centered community, which integrates thinking and believing in ways that encourage intellectual growth, nurture faith, and inspire action. The commitment to academic excellence, which fosters the intellectual development of all students, is an integral part of the mission of our school.
RELIGION
Your child will learn to:
- God as our Father and our Creator
- Jesus is the Son of God
- The Holy Spirit is our Helper
- Jesus give us the Church
- The Church’s seasons: The Church’s celebrations (the sacraments)
- The Bible is God’s word
- How to live as achild of God, a family, and as a community
- To love God and each other
- To share our faith with our Catholic community in prayer, at Mass, and through service
- Make choices using Jesus as an example
SOCIAL STUDIES
General areas of study:
- Maps and globes (identify symbols, land, water, and the cardinal directions)
- Holidays
- Patriotic symbols and citizenship
- Our community
MATH
Your child will learn to:
- Extend and create patterns
- Rote count by 1’s, 2’s, 5’s and 10’s
- Write numbers to 100
- Count backwards from 50
- Recognize odd and even numbers
- Identify the ordinal position of object through tenth
- Order and compare objects and numbers
- Read and interpret date in a bar graph
- Compute addition facts through 19
- Add and subtract 2 digit numbers
- Identify halves and fourths of objects
- Identify geometric shapes (2D and 3D)
- Recognize and associate value with coins
- Identify time to the hour and half hour
- Use the correct operation (-,+) for solving problems
WRITING
Your child will learn to and practice:
- The writing process: pre-writing, draft, revising, proof reading, and publishing
- Collaborative writing
- Identify various sentence types and their structure
- Proper word order and usuage
- Understand and demonstrate proper use of capitalization and punctuation
READING
Your child will learn to:
- Recognize letters and their sounds
- Use phonetic skills when reading
- Recognize high frequency words
- Read orally with clarity and expression
- Use pre-reading strategies
- Use context clues to determine reading
- Recall details from reading selection
- Self correct sequence of event
- Retell a story from beginning to end including characters and setting
- Identify parts of a book
- Read independently for a variety of purposes
SPELLING
Your child will learn:
- Letter-sound relationships—Blends—Consonants
- Long and short vowel recognition
- Spell high frequency words correctly
- Spell in daily writing
SCIENCE
Your child will:
- Investigate weather and its elements
- Investigate organisms and their habitats
- Use the process of scientific inquiry to develop understanding and gain information
COMMUNITY-BUILDING ACTIVITIES
- Pease Partner activities
- Liturgy planning, preparation, and performance for school Masses
- Participate in the Christmas program
- Attend various field trips around the community to enhance our curriculum
- End of the year picnic
COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY
- Stars Reading Assessment program
- Supplemental reading program
- Various educational programs
HEALTH
Your child will learn about:
- Personal hygiene and the spread of germs
- Nutrition and fitness
- Safety emergency response
P.E.
Students receive 30 minutes of P.E. two times a week in which the focus is on gross and fine motor skills, learning new games, participation and respect for others.
MUSIC
Students receive 30 minutes of music two times a week. They will continue to learn a large variety of folk songs, learn to listen to their singing and determine how to improve it. They will focus on learning and using basic music concepts—Beat, Rhythm, melody, Harmony, etc.—both in singing and in learning to handle simple instruments. They will learn the background of many of the songs and dances. They will be expected to perform at least once during the year.
ART
Art projects are integrated into the classroom curriculum through 2 hour of instruction each week with our school’s art teacher.
Your child will create art involving:
- Still life
- Landscape
- Figure drawing
- Book illustrations
Your child will learn skills related to:
- Contour drawing
- Tempera and watercolor painting
- Finger painting
- Collage
- Printmaking
- Proper use and care of art materials
MESSAGE TO PARENTS:
Children of the same age are not always at the same developmental stage. Consequently, the objectives present in this guide may need to be modified or enriched depending upon the need of the individual child.
We hope these objectives will help you understand our focus for teaching and learning, and we invite you to join us in this great education endeavor.
Parental involvement is welcomed and encouraged at any time during the day throughout the year. We welcome parent volunteers to assist us in our classrooms, on field trips, as well as other school functions.
September 2007