Academics
Life in first grade is busy and exciting!  In kindergarten, the students spent a lot of time playing in order to learn basic social skills like sharing, taking turns, and problem solving, which are necessary in order to learn throughout the rest of their education.  By first grade, we hope the children have learned these skills well enough where we no longer need to focus on them, but can focus more energy on academics.

In first grade, our primary focus is on reading and math.  In reading, we review short vowel and consonant sounds from kindergarten, and also learn long vowel and other consonant sounds.  By the end of first grade, students are fluently reading easy-reader books!  They've also learned a lot of phonics, vocabulary, and grammar skills, and can write short stories and research reports!

In math we build on the basic skills the children learned in kindergarten and increase to 2-digit addition and subtraction, place value, time to the half-hour, adding money up to $1.00, geometric shapes, and fractions of one half and one fourth.  The children are so proud of themselves for being able to do such "hard" math skills!

First grade social studies focuses on the concepts of family life past and present, where we live from our town to continents and oceans, citizenship rights and responsibilities, and economics for kids!  The children also love learning about geology in our world and our everyday surrounds as part of our science pebbles, sand, and silt unit.  And believe it or not, many students will tell you the most exciting part of first grade is when we study insect life cycles, with hands-on experiences with insects in our own classroom.

The children at Winterquist also go to phy. ed., music, computers, and media multiple times each week.  We work on art, handwriting, and social skills in our own classroom.  We follow school-wide and classroom specific behavior expectations.  We pride ourselves on being a bully-free school, offering differentiated instruction within each classroom, and being a technology leader with our digital engagement initiative and iPads in the classroom.