The first grade reading curriculum includes a balanced literacy program. This focuses on phonemic awareness, phonics, high-frequency/sight words, vocabulary, reading, and fluency. Comprehension strategies are modeled, taught and practiced for fiction, nonfiction and informational texts. These strategies include why the sequence of events is important to a story, how both the words and pictures of a story help us to better understand, how to use topic, main idea and details to summarize, how to use real life experiences to predict/infer, why categorizing and classifying helps us gain better understanding, and how comparing and contrasting helps us to see what is alike and different in the story. Differentiated instruction strategies help all students to read texts that are “just right” for them. Children are given the opportunity to visit our school library and check out books.

Grammar, writing, spelling, handwriting, listening, speaking and viewing are part of the language arts curriculum. First graders are introduced to different types of sentences, parts of speech, capitalization, and use of punctuation. Writing includes whole group and individual writing activities. Phonetic spelling is encouraged early in the year but is soon replaced by conventional spelling that focuses on word patterns and high-frequency words. Handwriting focuses on upper and lowercase letters and numbers, proper formation and spacing of letters and words.