1st Grade

The reading program encourages students’ love of reading and meets their personalized needs. Flexible ability groups provide opportunities for our children to feel both successful and challenged. At every level, they are exposed to a range of genres, including: realistic fiction; animal fantasy; expository nonfiction; poetry; folktales; fairy tales; and plays. The stories selected enhance students’ understanding of phonics and phonemic awareness, expand their sight word recognition and vocabularies, build their literal and inferential comprehension, and heighten their overall language experience. They also motivate our early readers to become lifelong book lovers.

Through readers’ theater, our 1st Graders practice orating before an audience, developing their reading voice, fluency, and confidence. They further build upon their oral language skills by reciting rhythmic and phonetic poetry that includes their weekly spelling patterns. Focusing on analogies helps our students to make connections among words.

The language arts program highlights students’ ongoing development in oral communication, listening, and written expression. Teacher-directed and independent lessons, along with classroom discussions, help to enhance students’ speaking, vocabulary, and auditory comprehension. As their comfort with writing grows, they begin to express their thoughts using complete sentences, capitalization, and punctuation. They also internalize new spelling patterns through a structured linguistic and phonetic approach. 

Our curriculum provides many opportunities for students to develop their writing skills. Some examples of writing projects include: creating imaginative stories using descriptive words; writing reflections in science and math journals; and completing a variety of book reports. Finally, they develop, through interpretation and reflection, an appreciation for poetry, before attempting to pen their own short poems. 

First Grade students also participate in the Writers' Workshop program at least three times a week. The goal of the program is for children to write what they know by selecting topics that are personally meaningful and relevant to them. Through focused mini-lessons and individual conferences with the teacher, students enhance their craft as writers and become independent authors of a variety of literary pieces. At the conclusion of each instructional unit, students publish a piece of their work and share it in celebration with the rest of the class.

Our Singapore Math program enhances students' higher-level thinking and understanding of real-life mathematical concepts. These include: addition and subtraction with regrouping; time; money; measurement; geometry (shapes); and estimation. Taught in small, flexible, ability-based groups, the program allows for each child’s readiness-level to be carefully considered. Moreover, daily mathematical fluency activities help to hone students’ critical thinking skills and to sharpen their math facts through 40 in both addition and subtraction. 

In the 1st Grade, number bonds become the key to unlocking the door to more complex mathematics; they help children to understand how groups of tens can aid them in adding and subtracting. Students also begin to develop an understanding of part-to-part and part-to-whole relationships, to carry out higher-level computations, to calculate in their heads using mental math, and to create and solve story problems, choosing the correct operation. 

Through direct, hands-on interaction with manipulatives, such as number lines, base ten blocks, Unifix Cubes, counters, coins, dice, and clocks, students gain important life skills. Finally, to foster creative problem solving the 1st Grade students work through Cathy Hoyt’s Math Champ Challenge program. The Math Champ Challenge programs encourage students to focus on how a problem is solved through a variety of strategies including drawing, acting it out, the use of manipulatives, and diagrams.

The Social Studies curriculum focuses on family, neighborhood, community, and Los Angeles, as well as on basic geography. Each unit is also paired with lessons about the 1st Grade's sister country, Japan, during which students learn about Japanese culture, history, and traditions. Students benefit from our interactive, online curriculum, full of rich stories, beautiful illustrations, and hands-on demonstration activities. Although 1st Graders are still developmentally centered on the concept of self, it is important that they begin to learn to look outside of themselves to see the similarities and differences which distinguish them from others and make them unique.

In this vein, students are often asked to compare and contrast people and things while studying various social studies themes. As part of our community unit, the children share about their own neighborhood and build a collage, later comparing it to neighborhoods in our sister country. Students explore their identities and learn about the identities of their classmates. To gain a deeper understanding of their family's heritage, students write letters to a special "grandpal" inquiring about the "grandpal's" cherished memories and experiences as a first grader. Finally, they compare this information to their own life experiences. 

In our Global Education unit of study, we focus on the sister country of Japan and compare our own experiences in the United States to those of our global buddies. Students gain background and real-world knowledge about Japan’s people and traditions, sharing this knowledge with their friends abroad. 

As part of Laurence’s Character Education/Service Learning program, the First Grade participates in school wide service learning projects such as Socktober, the weekly food drive, and Toy Drive. The First Grade students create animal blankets as a service learning project for local animal shelters.

The 1st Grade science program focuses on the students’ awareness of themselves and the world in which they live. First Graders discover many different animal and plant habitats, and take field trips to culminate their learning. They also garden and harvest in the Edible Garden and learn about the importance of keeping their bodies and the environment healthy and safe. Our young scientists think and work like real scientists by exploring and experimenting in our fully-equipped lab, making observations, keeping journals, and communicating reflections.

Our Buddy program fosters the children’s social/emotional growth and shows them just how much they are cared for. First Grade students are mentored by 5th Graders, through meaningful social interactions.