Welcome to St. John's First Grade.

Everything we do is geared towards helping your child feel secure, happy and inspired to learn. View our web pages for a description of the course work, field trips, and other helpful information we feel helpful.

Math
The Silver Burdett and Ginn Mathematics series is used in our math program. Flash cards, puppets, props from real life, counters, money, number lines, and duplicated materials will be used in our program as well. Most children can perform addition and subtraction operations quite readily, but need to commit those facts to memory to build computation speed for the future. Math papers not completed in class should be finished at home and returned the next day. The children will be given additional written homework in math. In the future, we plan for the children to have mastered the addition and subtraction facts to ten, to tell time by the hour and half hour and to be able to count change to $.99. Any time you can spend reinforcing these concepts is time well spent.

• Good Times We Share
• Take a Closer Look
• Let's Learn Together
• Favorite Things Old and New
• Take Me There
• Surprise Me

For each book, the child will use the reader and have Take Home Books sent home for practice. Title of the readers are indicated above. The first grade program will also use a phonics workbook to give the children additional practice in the area of phonics. The Orton-Gillingham program will be incorporated throughout the year as well.

Language Arts

The first grade program for language arts is designed to build mastery of basic skills and concepts in oral and written language. Skills in this area will be developed through group discussion, oral recitation, group compositions, poetry, books, and individually written compositions. Good listening skills, clear enunciation, correct word usage, and the use of complete sentences will be encouraged in oral recitations. In written compositions we will encourage correct grammar and punctuation.

Social Science
The Harcourt Brace My World Social Studies program will also be used with the children. The children will be introduced to some basic geographic terms on a global level. Cooperation will be discussed in terms of working together to meet the needs of the community and family, as an aspect of good citizenship. A first grader will be picked each week to share his/her family, hobbies, pets, etc. with us to promote a sense of community in the classroom.

Religion
A revised edition of Loyola University Press Christ Our Life is our religion text. The first grade program will provide experiences to develop the following areas in the children:

• A greater awareness of the needs and importance of all God's creation.
• An attitude of sharing and caring towards all people.
• A deeper knowledge of the three members of the Blessed Trinity, the Church, the sacraments, and the Liturgy.
• A better understanding of the role of the Bible and prayer in our lives.
• A look at the great examples set for us by various saints.

The Benziger Family Life Series will be used throughout the school year along with the regular religion text.

Activities
Field trips and activities we plan to do this year are:

Potter Park or Binder Park Zoo. To be announced.

Responsibilities
A first grader is responsible for many things:

completing and turning in homework
keeping his/her supplies in place
taking home communications from school
keeping track of lunch tickets, library books, delivering communications to school, etc.
All of these create quite a challenge for most children. We continue to work at developing responsibility throughout the year.