1st Grade

The focus of the religion curriculum is to nurture the growing relationship between Jesus and each child. Students will encounter daily religion lessons that teach about the Mass, Jesus’ role in our lives, the Holy Days, and liturgical seasons celebrated throughout the year. Students will explore the words and meanings of basic prayers.

Our program goals are to develop basic reading skills including: a strong sight word vocabulary, comprehension, and fluent and expressive oral reading. Students will be exposed to a variety of reading materials. In phonics, students will develop word attack skills by blending vowels and consonants. Teachers will invite students to participate in various activities to enhance speaking and fluent reading materials. Orton Gillingham and The Phonics Dance are used to improve reading and spelling skills.

Students will develop the ability to speak and write clearly in complete sentences. We will study sentence parts, punctuation, and sentence writing. These skills will be incorporated throughout all areas of the curriculum. In Spelling, we focus on the spelling of high frequency and high interest words. Students will work from phonetic spellings to correct spellings of words. Students will use sound patterns and word families to spell correctly.

Using the My Math program, teachers challenge students while inspiring them to embrace math through meaningful real-world applications. The three components of rigor— conceptual understanding, procedural skill and fluency, and application, —are woven with equal intensity throughout the program, enabling students to steadily grow their math ability and confidence. Topics covered include place value, time, money, measurement, geometry, and computation with the mastery of addition and subtraction facts up to 18.

In science, children make discoveries about their environment and themselves. They will have the opportunity to participate in hands-on activities, and to investigate, make hypotheses, test ideas, and draw conclusions. We will study plants, animals, food chains, the human body, seasons, weather, matter, force and gravity, nutrition, and birds.

(Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) is a large part of our curriculum. Every Friday students will be involved in STEMfest Friday where they are given a specific challenge and materials and they have to use the Engineering Design Process to plan, create, and improve their experiment. We also have two large multi-week STEM challenges. For the first challenge, students build 10 Lego machines, all of which use force and chain reactions to trigger each other. The second uses changing states of matter as students use hands-on problem solving skills to create the perfect play dough recipe.

We will learn about what it means to be a community helper and have good character. We will also study important people in history, including presidents and explorers, and learn about different cultures around the world.

Students attend PE and computer lab twice a week and music, art, library, Liturgy Music, and Spanish once a week.

Masterworks, Field Day, Muse Machine, Lent and Advent Retreats, and Field Trips: Fire Station, Sunwatch Indian Village, Newport Aquarium, and Caesar’s Creek Fossil Dig.