Language Arts in First Grade
Through the integrated thematic lens of Change, students become self-reliant readers and writers able express their own creative ideas. Through higher-level thinking activities and icons for depth and complexity, students learn strategies to increase elaboration with description, use context and audience to structure writing, deepen research skills and prove with evidence, and understand biographies as “stories of lives.”
Students will practice the following:
- Engage in collaborative small group and independent research and writing projects.
- Navigate table of contents, glossaries, and website menus and icons to find information.
- Recall information from experiences or gather information from sources to answer questions.
- Present research findings in creative and engaging ways.
- Read across multiple genres, perspectives, structures, and purposes through a thematic lens.
- Articulate reasons for reading diverse selections.
- Use patterns to decode words and decipher separate sounds in words.
- Identify prefix, suffix, and root segments of words to decode words with common prefixes.
- Understand and use compound words.
- Use context to decode new words.
- Read with accuracy and fluency to support comprehension, and with appropriate expression and rate.*
- Apply strategies of sequencing, connecting, visualizing, predicting, questioning, summarizing.
- Improve comprehension strategies for interpretations or inferences.
- Describe points of view and how characters change over time in response to events and challenges.
- Recognize, discuss, and apply literary devices and story structures
- Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of details within a text.
- Compare and contrast versions of the same story through a thematic and inclusive lens.
- Identify how authors use reasons to support ideas or arguments.
- Explain how images contribute information and support comprehension.
- Write across genres and perspectives.
- Respond to reading with writing.
- Engage in the writing process: brainstorm, draft, revise, publish.
- Learn and apply multiple brainstorming strategies.
- Practice articulating opinions about texts through guided constructive feedback models.
- Describe events and characters’ actions, thoughts, and feelings with details.
- Use sentence order, verb tense, and temporal words to sequence events.
- Support opinions with reasons, facts, or textual examples.
- Write with a topic sentence and conclude thinking with an ending statement to eventually write clear and concise paragraphs.
- Increase flow of writing with transitions or linking words to signal sequence in writing.
- Understand and defend topic sentences through facts, descriptive details, and lists of actions and feelings.
Grammar and Conventions
- Use commas for greetings and closings when writing letters (e.g. Dear Mom, and Love, Isla).
- Identify and use apostrophes to show possession and common contractions.
- Distinguish and apply descriptive verbs, adjectives, and adverbs to increase precise words in expression.