First Grade Curriculum Guide

RELIGION	Sadlier We Believe. The first grade religion text aims at helping young students understand basic truths of our faith such as: the Trinity, Heaven, sin, the Blessed Mother, the life of Jesus, and the works of the church and its members. The first grade also begins a simple introduction to Bible stories and they learn various prayers.
MATHEMATICS	Silver Burdett Ginn Mathematics. Our first grade math series focuses on addition and subtraction facts, an introduction to geometry, fractions, telling time, word problems, ordinal numbers, measuring, identifying patterns, and double-digit addition and subtraction. Lessons are taught through group activities and reinforced through guided and independent practice worksheets.
SCIENCE	Silver Burdett Ginn. This course provides students with learning experiences that relate to their everyday world and the environment around them. Our science book is divided into four units: Life science, Physical science, Earth science, and the Human body. Health is taught as a part of science. In first grade we focus on germs, staying clean and healthy, the five senses, the food groups and safety.
LANGUAGE ARTS	Scott Foresman. Our reading series is divided into 6 units. Students begin with 6 Big Books with the following goals: phonemic awareness, sound/spelling associations, reading fluency, introduction to writing, and responsibility for their own work. The student readers move first graders into the next stage of reading and language skills. The students have 5 readers that include a variety of literature styles, from poems, fiction, nonfiction, and plays. Grammar is taught and reinforced through writing in our daily lessons. Our spelling lessons revolve around recognizing spelling patterns in our high frequency words. We have a weekly spelling test. Our first grade Phonics lessons focus on short and long vowel sounds, letter blends and diagraphs, compound words and possessives. Phonics is taught in a multi-sensory manner and is reinforced and applied through student workbooks. Zaner-Bloser. This writing series teaches proper manuscript letter formation and practice at how to properly space words when writing. Students write letters, words, phrases and sentences in their writing workbook.
SOCIAL STUDIES	Scott Foresman-All Together. First grade social studies in this series is divided into six units: Time for School, In My Community, Work! Work! Work! Our Earth Our Resource, This is Our Community, and Our Country Our World. Map and globe skills are also taught throughout the year.