The start of first grade is a time for dusting off the skills and habits that children learned during kindergarten. In Building Good Reading Habits, children establish partnerships that tap into the social power of peers working together to help each other become more strategic as readers. Word Detectives supports students’ word solving skills and their knowledge of high-frequency words. Learning About the World: Reading Nonfiction taps into children’s natural curiosity as they explore nonfiction, learn comprehension strategies, word solving, vocabulary, fluency, and author’s craft. Readers Have Big Jobs to Do: Fluency, Phonics, and Comprehension focuses on the reading process to set children up to read increasingly complex texts. Meeting Characters and Learning Lessons: A Study of Story Elements spotlights story elements and the skills that are foundational to literal and inferential comprehension, including empathy, character study, and interpretation.

(Excerpt from Heinemann.com)

First Grade Reading Units:

• Building Good Reading Habits
• Word Detectives
• Learning About the World: Reading Nonfiction
• Readers Have Big Jobs to Do: Fluency, Phonics, and Comprehension
• Meeting Characters and Learning Lessons: A Study of Story Elements

In Small Moments: Writing with Focus, Detail, and Dialogue students take the everyday events of their young lives and make them into focused, well-structured stories, then they learn to breathe life into the characters by making them talk, think, and interact. In Nonfiction Chapter Books, students enter the world of informational writing as they combine pictures and charts with domain-specific vocabulary and craft moves to create engaging teaching texts. In Writing Reviews, students create persuasive reviews of all sorts—pizza restaurant reviews, TV show reviews, ice cream flavor reviews, and finally book reviews that hook the reader, clearly express the writer’s opinion, and bolster their argument in convincing ways. In From Scenes to Series: Writing Fiction, students learn to “show, not tell” and use action, dialogue, and feelings to create a whole series of fiction books.

(Excerpt from Heinemann.com)

First Grade Writing Units:

• Small Moments: Writing with Focus, Detail, and Dialogue
• Writing How-To Books
• Nonfiction Chapter Books
• Writing Reviews
• From Scenes to Series: Writing Fiction

The First-Grade units provide an instructional pathway in phonics, introduces high-leverage phonics concepts and strategies in a way that keeps pace with students’ reading and writing and helps them understand when, how, and why they can use phonics to read and write.

Talking and Thinking About Letters touches on all the most important phonics concepts from kindergarten: letter names and sounds, short vowels in CVC words, phonograms, blends, and digraphs, and a short list of approximately fifty high-frequency and high-utility words. The Mystery of the Silent e challenges children to use phonics workshop as a place to study words closely like a piece of evidence and make discoveries to help them understand how language works by looking closely at words and word parts to decode difficult words by breaking them into parts and putting those parts back together. From Tip to Tail: Reading Across Words

rally kids to read nonfiction closely and thoughtfully by looking all the way across words and focuses on high-frequency words. Word Builders: Using Vowel Teams to Build Big Words introduces the theme of becoming word builders by focusing on vowel teams. Marvelous Bloopers: Learning Through Wise Mistakes teaches into r-controlled vowels, high frequency words, capitalization, prefixes, contractions, and punctuation.

(Excerpt from Heinemann.com)

First Grade Phonics Units:

• Talking and Thinking About Letters
• Mystery of the Silent E
• Tip to Tail
• Word Builders
• Marvelous Bloopers

The Michigan Math Standards call for a balance between procedural knowledge and conceptual understanding. The K-12 Standards for Mathematical Practice, shown below, are types of student expertise developed progressively in each grade-level course.

1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
4. Model with mathematics.
5. Use appropriate tools strategically.
6. Attend to precision.
7. Look for and make use of structure.
8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

• Represent and solve problems involving addition and subtraction.

• Understand and apply properties of operations and the relationship between addition and subtraction.

• Add and subtract within 20.

• Work with addition and subtraction equations. Extending the counting sequence.

• Understand place value.

• Use place value understanding and properties of operations to add and subtract.

• Measure lengths indirectly and by iterating length units.

• Tell and write time.

• Represent and interpret data.

• Reason with shapes and their attributes.

Unit 1: Civics

• Purpose & Needs of Rules
• Power & Authority in School
• Resolving Conflict
• Making Fair Decisions
• Symbols of the United States
• Responsibilities at School & Home
• Participating in Civic Life

Unit 2: History & Geography

• Distinguish Between Producers & Consumers
• Distinguish Between Goods & Services
• Scarcity & Choice
• Why People Trade
• How To Earn Money
• Why People Use Money
• Distinguish Between Past, Present & Future
• Investigate Family History
• Use Historical Sources to Draw Conclusions About Family and School Life In Past
• Compare Life Today to Life In The Past
• U.S. Holidays

Unit 3:  Geography

• Construct Maps to Show Aerial Perspective
• Use Absolute & Relative Location
• Use Maps to Distinguish Between Landforms & Water
• Distinguish Between Physical & Human Characteristics
• Describe boundaries of Different School Regions
• Describe Diversity in Family Life
• Describe How We Modify & Adapt to Physical Environment