Our Approach

The first-grade child’s day is structured based on a healthy balance of quiet, inward-focused time and periods of activity with an outward focus.

Weekly Rhythm

The weekly rhythm includes a daily morning lesson, work in the garden, meditation, poetry, singing, watercolor painting, beeswax modeling, pentatonic flute, and free, unstructured play in nature. Our location has plenty of beautiful outdoor space, raised garden beds, and nearby parks. This curriculum will have a special focus on nature. Through time spent outdoors, observing the natural world, gardening and seasonal festivals, we will explore our connection to the natural world, our place in it, and responsibility to it. It is not a hurried curriculum stressing the child with memorization of facts but rather one that lays a deep foundation for learning by engaging the child on all levels. Morning begins with the main lesson which includes circle time with movement, songs, and recitation, followed by story time, and finally writing or bookwork. The early lessons are mainly pictorial, increasing in content as the child’s capacity for concentration grows. Main lesson would be followed by snack and free play, painting, handwork, gardening, or beeswax modeling, then lunch, a long outdoor play time, community work, story, rest, and dismissal.

Main Lesson

First-grade main lessons will cover the introduction of consonants and vowels through stories that embody the quality of the letters, learning word families, writing the letters, copying words and short sentences, reading words and short sentences, and writing short sentences. Numbers will be introduced through their qualities and experienced through movement, manipulatives, and imaginative stories. First grade students will learn roman numerals, the four main math functions, counting to 100, writing numbers 1-50, how to identify even vs. odd numbers, and learn to solve simple math problems. The Main Lesson Book is a hand-crafted, hand-illustrated book, written by each child that covers the subjects studied in class. By creating their own “textbooks,” students move beyond being passive recipients of an educational program to being active collaborators in their own learning.

First Grade Curriculum At-a-Glance By Subject

Form Drawing

  • Straight and curved lines

  • Standing forms

  • Running forms

Spanish

  • Immersion through speech; presentation of vocabulary through stories

  • Recitation of poetry, songs, and stories; accompanying movement and gestures

  • Comprehension and speech practiced: size, color, number, how many, what is it, I have, and identifying commands

 Handwork

  • Make knitting needles

  • Cast-on, the knit stitch, decreasing, bind-off, and sewing

Social Studies

  • Mythologies of global cultures and folk tales from around the world

  • Descriptions of various cultures and environments through oral storytelling

Language Arts

  • Pictorial introduction of the alphabet

  • Handwriting: upper and lower case letters

  • Oral storytelling

  • Recitation of poetry and verse

  • Class play: group choral form

 Mathematics

  • Roman Numerals from I to XII

  • Odd and even numbers

  • Four mathematical processes: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division

 Science

  • Stories of the seasons and the natural world

  • Exploration of nature

  • Gardening: tending a plot, growth cycles of plants, tending life from seed to harvest, and gardening stories