English

First grade English language arts is built on phonics. Students learn letter-sound relationships, blends and digraphs, decode one- and two-syllable words, and build a bank of high-frequency sight words so reading becomes fluent rather than effortful.

Comprehension work covers retelling a story with key details, identifying characters and settings, and asking and answering questions about a text. Writing moves from single sentences into short opinion, informative and narrative pieces, with capital letters, end punctuation and phonetic spelling used consistently.