First Grade

Overview
At All Saints, one immediately notices the lively chatter and joy among the six and seven-years-old in our First grade classrooms.  First grade is a time when children build strong friendships with their peers and their friendships become just as important as their family relationships.  They thrive on encouragement and have a tremendous capacity for enjoyment.  Students often work in small groups to encourage social development and relationship building.  However, the classroom also supports students who crave independent work. The room is set up to encourage independence and growth.  By the end of First grade, the class runs their milestone project, the Waffle Inn.  This longstanding tradition at All Saints allows social First graders to work together cooperatively and to understand that each person in a business or community matters to the success of the whole.

First grade is a time when students begin to recognize their own independence from adults and may begin to test relationships with authority, tease, throw tantrums and complain.  These new behavior patterns coincide with extreme sensitivity and highly competitive behavior.  The First grader is taught with compassion, encouragement and consistency, and is encouraged to demonstrate positive behavior.  This approach helps First Graders at All Saints begin to understand how to master new social situations with greater ease. By the end of First Grade students are socially aware and are ready to work cooperatively with their peers.

Language Arts
Because students at this developmental stage present a variety of different reading levels and abilities, classroom teachers are intentional about working in small groups to maximize the level of attention and personalized instruction each student receives.  Building on the skills developed in Kindergarten, the Houghton-Mifflin Reading Program utilizes whole class instruction in the form of mini-lessons before working individually or in a small group.  In Handwriting, students begin to focus more on letter formation. They are encouraged to write longer journal entries and extended pieces of text.  Students are also guided in choosing independent reading material suited to their level of development and spend increasing amounts of time reading on their own and aloud.

Curriculum Units:

• All together now
• Surprise
• Let’s look around
• Let’s be friends
• Home sweet home
• Animal adventures
• We can work it out
• Our earth
• Special friends
• Folktales
• We can do it

Spelling Focus:

• Short and long vowels
• Double consonants
• L, r and s clusters
• Contractions
• Final clusters
• Digraphs sh, th, wh, ch, tch

Grammar Focus:

• Capital letters
• Punctuation
• Naming words
• Action words
• Parts of a sentence
• Exclamations
• Proper nouns and pronouns
• Present tense
• Verb endings (s, ed, ing)

Writing Focus:

• All About Me books
• Class stories
• Complete sentences
• Personal narratives
• Response to literature
• Friendly letter
• All About Us books

Additional Activities Include:

• Study skills; parts of a book, following directions, using the library, alphabetical order, reading a map, and using a dictionary

Mathematics
First Grade is an exciting time in the development of mathematical thinking.  Students love the challenge of putting their skills to work in novel situations and to transfer their knowledge from one problem to another.  The curriculum covers a wide variety of concepts, which students are encouraged to explore in depth.  The teacher focuses on problem-solving strategies throughout instructional time, and encourages students to articulate their methods and strategies to deepen their own learning as well as benefit from the learning of their classmates.

Curriculum Units:

• Numerical operations; basic addition and subtraction
• Number sense; counting to 100 and number lines
• Skip counting
• Time
• Reading and making graphs
• Calendars
• Money
• Geometry; 2-dimensional shapes, 3-dimensional shapes, transforming shapes and symmetry
• Standard and non-standard measurement
• Introduction to double digit addition and subtraction
• Estimating
• Place value

Activities:

• Math Missions
• Manipulatives
• Kapla blocks
• Using number lines and 100 chart
• Puzzles

Science
First Graders are naturally curious about the world around them and how and why things work.  The First Grade science curriculum builds on this intuitive exploration of the natural world while introducing more formalized experimentation and opportunities for hands-on study.  Students are challenged to “think like a scientist” as they embark on experiments to help them learn about the natural world.  Science instruction in all topics involves the making and testing of hypotheses, and the drawing of logical and scientific conclusions.

Curriculum Units:

• Earth, our home
• Weather and sky
• Describing matter
• Energy sources and motion
• Plants, animals and people
• Living things and where they live

Activities:

• Science labs; including making “gak,” air magic, water wheels, using a thermometer, phases of the moon, floating and sinking, mixtures, light and sound, planting, classifying animals, and life cycles
• Explore scientific tools
• Recycling lab
• Science journals
• Science Fair

Social Studies
In an effort to better understand their world, First Graders use what they know about their life in school as a jumping-off point to investigate their neighborhood and community.  They build on this knowledge throughout the year as they study their community and different communities around the world.  Students learn about the makeup of a community, including the people, businesses and municipal structures in place to ensure the safety and rights of its inhabitants.  Through an in-depth study of Hoboken, students study the aspects that make up this community (i.e. parks and recreation, city services, retail, etc).  The class visits different locations around Hoboken in an effort to better understand the inner workings of a city.  Later in the year students use this knowledge and apply it to their study of colonial communities, which allows them to make comparisons between our community today and colonial communities of the past.

Curriculum Units:

• Time for school
• In my community
• Work, work, work
• Holidays
• Ruby Bridges
• Susan B. Anthony
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• This is our country
• Our country, our world

Activities:

• Creation of classroom rules
• Flat Stanley project
• Hoboken map project
• Historical read alouds
• Waffle Inn fundraiser

Art
In art class, First Grade students explore a wide variety of art materials including collage, paint, plaster and clay. By the end of the year they are able to identify how a variety of artists and cultures utilize materials to create art. Students look closely at Illuminated Manuscripts, Mexican Mola and Impressionist landscapes in particular. They also begin to identify symbolism in art; for example, while studying Native American Totems, students identify symbolic qualities in animals. Through critique, students identify aspects of artwork they like and are able to explain their preferences. Students begin to grow in their fluency and ability to make artistic choices, giving them the ability to explain their choices.

Art Prompt:

• Illuminated portraits of family members
• Totem sculptures
• Mesoamerican stamps
• Mola placemats
• Empty bowls
• Color mixing
• Nevelson Style Assemblage
• Landscape painting of Flat Rock Brook

Artist/Movement:

• Illuminated manuscripts
• Native American totem poles
• Pattern, repetition
• Mola
• Lawson Oyekan
• Louise Nevelson
• Abstract expressionism

Technique:

• Drawing
• Embellishment
• Proportion
• Sculpture
• Printmaking
• Appliqué
• Clay techniques
• Relief
• Assemblage

Community Time
In First Grade Community Time, students focus on the family structure. The Tanenbaum Center for Inter-Religious Understanding Curriculum: Building Blocks of Democracy is used with students. The class explores the variety of family structures that exist including single- and two-parent families, families with divorced parents, step families, mixed race families, and adoptive families, just to name a few.  By discussing different family configurations, students are able to recognize that all families can function as a loving, supportive unit no matter the type or make up. Students create a family scrap book which they compare with their classmates to better understand the variety of family structures that exist within our school community, and also study several family-centered holidays including Raksha Bandhan, Christmas, Hanukah, and Dia De Los Muertos.

Curriculum Units:

• Respect
• Family as a quilt
• Different kinds of families
• Celebrating our ancestors
• Families and holidays
• Empty bowls

Activities:

• Create individual family quilt squares
• Create family scrapbook
• Helping contract
• Family poem

Milestone Project-Waffle Inn
The Waffle Inn, the First Grade milestone project, is a longstanding tradition at All Saints. Each year, the students transform the Parish Hall into a restaurant with the house specialty being – you guessed it – waffles! Each year the event takes place around St. Patrick’s Day, with preparations beginning in February.

Prior to the restaurant opening, each student must fill out an application explaining what job he/she would like and why he/she would be successful. The “applicant” is also required to attend an interview with the restaurant managers (a.k.a. the teachers) during which they must answer challenging questions about how they would handle given situations. The students also create menus, advertisements, and invitations, and solicit parent volunteers to bring in necessary supplies.

Each year the class takes a trip to a restaurant in Hoboken to see how a real restaurant is run.  The students see the kitchen and have an opportunity to talk to the staff about  their responsibilities. The class returns to school with a lot of ideas for their own restaurant!

On the day of the big event, hosts and hostesses greet each class as students enter the restaurant.  Servers take orders and bus people help to clean and reset tables.  Parent volunteers are always present to help make the waffles while the student chefs add the desired toppings.  Cashiers collect Waffle Inn money and distribute a notepad and pencil to each customer as a souvenir.  The First Graders enjoy serving the other classes, but their favorite part always comes at the end of the day when they are served waffles by their own parents, who get a waffle with the works, of course!

This project is a meaningful part of the curriculum as it reinforces lessons around money, which is introduced during First Grade.  It also allows students to learn more about the jobs and businesses in the local community.  Finally, the students learn the importance of working together when they realize that each job is important and that the restaurant cannot run smoothly without everyone doing their part.

Field Trips
Children in First Grade benefit from hands-on field trips such as tri-annual trips to Flat Rock Brook Nature Center which allows them to connect their experiences in nature to their daily science lessons. In preparation for the opening of the Waffle Inn, students visit a local restaurant.

• Flat Rock Brook Nature Center
• Newark Planetarium
• St. Matthew’s Lunchtime Ministry
• Local restaurant
• Liberty Science Center
• Bronx Botanical Garden
• Literature play
• Hoboken Historical Museum

Curriculum/Elementary Program: Next Page Second Grade