Curriculum: Grade 1

Curriculum Overview

Our holistic teaching principles recognise that artistic work in music, poetry, drawing, painting and sculpture is an essential part of becoming a well-rounded human being. Whilst your child will learn practical skills through artistic activities in our curriculum, the creative freedom experienced will go deeper and speak to their soul.

Grade 1 is truly a year of firsts – how to speak collectively when reciting a verse, how to answer a question, how to hold a pencil for writing, how to use block and stick crayons for drawing, how to care for materials, how to play with another or others, and much more. Those initial experiences create habits that can serve a child as they transition through the grades journey and beyond. The lessons of Grade 1 are foundational and seek to prepare the children for all that they will encounter in their academic years ahead. For example, the exploration of ‘straight and curved lines’ in Grade 1 lays the foundation for later written letters and numbers and formal geometry. Each subject is presented to allow the children ample time to take it up as the year progresses. All that is done in Grade 1 aims to create a rich learning environment in which the children’s capacities and skills may germinate and flourish.

Your first grader will learn:

• Language Arts: Letters and vocabulary through pictures, poems, class plays and storytelling

• Literature: Folk and fairy tales

• Mathematics: Number patterns and concepts, the four operations
• Science: Nature study
• Chinese: Greetings, colours, numbers, and basic phrases
• Physical Education: Cooperative clapping and rhyming games, chasing games, jump rope, parachute play and dancing
• Handwork: Basic knitting stitch leads to increasingly complex projects like a pouch, ball and cat
• Art: Watercolour painting, beeswax modelling and form drawing
• Music: Recorder and singing