First Grade

First Grade is a time of uninhibited wonder, enthusiasm for learning, and breathtaking, rapid growth.
The social, emotional, and intellectual identities that children construct for themselves during this period go a long way toward determining the subsequent trajectories of their lives.

Learning to read is one of the most important skills that a student develops during their early academic years. The skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking are essential tools for everyday learning. When students develop greater competence in reading and writing, their motivation to achieve increases. In our language arts curriculum, we use authentic reading experiences within a Balanced Literacy framework to meet the individual needs of students.

We believe it is important for children to learn letter-sound relationships and use them to figure out new words; however, we don’t subscribe to a “phonics-first” approach where children’s reading materials are limited by the letter sounds the teacher has introduced. We teach students to use the three cueing systems – meaning, structure, and graphophonics – together as a group of strategies, rather than in isolation. By giving students daily, extended periods of time to read books that are appropriately supportive and challenging, they get to practice in the whole act of reading and experience how all parts work together. Teachers can accurately match leveled trade books with individual students by using running record assessments, which indicate a reader’s Just Right level. Our goal is to provide effective methods and strategies for each student, to promote mastery of fundamental decoding skills, fluency, and to establish a foundation for deeper levels of comprehension.

First grade students develop their writing skills within the context of Writers Workshop, where students create individual pieces of writing, in a variety of genres. Individual students confer with a teacher on each stage of the writing process (planning, drafting, revising, editing and publishing). Additionally, students practice proper sentence structure and the fundamentals of good grammar, including capitalization and punctuation. At this stage, students begin to spell more conventionally, but invented spelling is still evident. Our word study curriculum focuses on understanding and applying spelling patterns.

Our Everyday Math curriculum supports the idea that children gain important insights about mathematics by building on one another's discoveries; one idea leads to another or to refinements of one's own conclusions. Discussion promotes good listening habits and a receptive attitude to the ideas of others. Talking about mathematics is an important part of thinking about mathematics. Our math curriculum teaches students how to gain important mathematical insights through whole group discussion and small group learning. Students learn computational skills as well as a broad range of mathematical concepts. Meaningful problem solving is involved in every lesson. Our program seeks a balance between: computational skills, conceptual understanding, and problem solving. Our Everyday Math curriculum encourages teachers and students to go beyond arithmetic to explore more of the rich mathematics discipline. Math is integrated into other subject areas and becomes part of the ongoing classroom routine, outdoor play, and transitional moments that occur during the day. In Everyday Math, mathematical thinking becomes intrinsic for students. While they are challenged by the curriculum, they are developing problem solving and higher order thinking skills. Because Everyday Math applies mathematical thinking to everyday situations, students recognize and appreciate how frequently mathematics intersects their lives.

The fundamentals of our First Grade mathematics curriculum include: number sense, algebra and basic functions, measurement, geometry, mathematical reasoning, statistics, data analysis and probability.

In the First Grade social studies curriculum, students begin to understand the connections between the past, present and future. Children learn to appreciate cultural differences and similarities through a well established "classroom society," where students experience democratic government and civic responsibility. Thematic units are drawn from the history and geography of Los Angeles, California and the United States. Units integrate language arts, music and art. Map skills are emphasized and local museums and the rich ethnic communities of Los Angeles are used as resources.
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Curtis School

15871 Mulholland Drive  ·  Los Angeles CA 90049
310-476-1251