Grade 1 Curriculum

With the text of We Believe: God Loves Us, the focus is on God’s love and the gift of His Son, Jesus, to help the students grow in faith. Using the Church’s liturgical calendar, the students experience the feast days and holy days of our faith. Through prayers and the rosary, the students celebrate the communal component of our Catholic faith.

Using the Reading Street program, the students have phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension integrated into their lessons. Small group instruction provides the opportunity for differentiated instruction to support the varied learning profiles. Exposure to different genres (fiction, nonfiction, plays, poetry) enriches the reading experience. Augmenting the reading program are the writing, grammar, spelling, and handwriting components of the language arts discipline. Opportunities for assimilating these components abound.

Using Sadlier’s Progress in Mathematics, the students are introduced to the process of addition and subtraction, place value, geometry, graphing, time, measurement, and the value of money. The use of manipulatives ensures that the children learn these concepts in a concrete manner. These skills are reinforced in the solving word problems which often reflect the students’ lives.

Students observe and explore plants, animals and habitats, rocks and minerals, matter and magnets, and the water cycle while taking nature walks, experimenting, creating, drawing, or listening to fiction and nonfiction text.

An awareness of the world and each individual’s place in it is broadened by studying communities—starting with the family, school and neighborhoods as the students learn about urban, suburban, and rural communities. Using globes and maps, the earth’s physical features are taught while map skills are practiced. The students read biographies of our country’s leaders and the Weekly Reader to explore current events.