Grades 1 and 2 - Charles River School

Building a Sense of Belonging

Our first and second grade classrooms provide students ages six through eight with a nurturing and collaborative community where children are known and respected for their individual strengths.

Meet the Teachers

mentors, coaches, advocates, superstars…

A Day in the Life

View a sample schedule which includes an overview of theme, language arts, math, social studies, science, technology, music, art, Spanish, physical education, and library.

Sample Schedule

Academics

Our thematic work integrates most of the elements of the first and second grade curricula – social studies, language arts, science, math, art, and music, and provide a meaningful context in which students develop their skills. Interwoven throughout is the exploration of Learning for Justice’s four social justice standards of Identity, Diversity, Justice and Action.

Developing skills

They develop the use of full sentences, appropriate capitalization and punctuation, and standard spelling conventions.
Through daily writing activities, students record and express their thoughts, and develop their skill for writing creative stories and poetry.
Faculty draw from both Project Read and Handwriting Without Tears curricula, building on students’ exposure to these programs in PreK/K.

Our goal is for children to recognize the enjoyment that reading brings and the patterns that exist within language for decoding and spelling. The reading program combines a whole-language and guided reading approach with phonetic instruction utilizing the Project Read curriculum. Children read individually, as well as to peers and teachers, and meet in small language arts groups. They express their understanding and appreciation of literature through dramatic interpretations and adaptations of stories. Through lively discussions, children make connections between characters and the plot and learn to recognize patterns of language. Children dictate and write stories using their own resources for content and spelling. As children write, they learn that recording their experiences makes lasting impressions. Children are exposed to the steps of the writing process: writing rough drafts, conferencing with peers and teachers, and revising their work.

In Grade One, children discover relationships between numbers and patterns. While building basic mathematical concepts they learn to predict patterns in mathematics using manipulatives and written materials. Our mathematical units include number sense, numeration, number and geometric patterns, balancing equations, addition, subtraction, missing addends, multiplication as repeated addition, value systems, simple fractions, time, and money. Estimating, predicting, graphing, and problem solving are always part of the math curriculum.

In Grade Two, we employ literature and manipulatives which allow the children to ‘see’ and understand more complex ideas and content. Mathematical units include understanding of numeration, place value, more complex patterns, addition and subtraction with regrouping, a beginning understanding of multiplication and division, shapes and their properties, symmetry and asymmetry, logical reasoning, measurement, money, time and fractions.

In the first and second grade programs, the focus is on learning to setup and use a desktop computer (mouse & keyboard skills), digital graphics, block-based programming and introducing computer science concepts (loops, if/then logic), introducing 3-D modeling, navigating a website, online safety, and creating circuits.

Examples of technology units include:

Physically installing and plugging in the computer lab desktops
Programming story animations in Scratch
Modeling houses in CAD software
Publishing persuasive awareness posters
Stop-motion animation

First and second grade art is a sequential program integrating the life of a student and thematic studies with an in-depth study of studio art. Projects rotate according to the classroom theme for the year.

Examples of topics of study in Art include:

Shapes, Marks, and Lines – animal drawing, sequential drawings, facial expressions
Color – Review of color mixing with primary and secondary colors plus black and white, symbolic use of color in facial expression drawings
Texture and Pattern – paper relief faces, surface textures in clay constructions
3-D Forms – imaginary construction with wood, clay animal sculptures, plaster puppets

The Spanish Music program is based on Canta y Baila Conmigo®, a unique program where young children experience another culture and language firsthand while exploring and developing musically in an age-appropriate manner. One/Two students continue to experience Spanish through music, and also have an opportunity to work on their listening and speaking skills in a classroom setting once a week. Students continue to build comfort and confidence with speaking a world language, and learn vocabulary and conversational skills through exploration, games, activities, and songs that are linked to the music curriculum and the classroom theme.

Developmental Skills:

Dual and complementary goals of music and language immersion
Children sing songs in Spanish from around the world and develop their musical skills, such as matching pitch and learning rhythms
Songs are also chosen to support classroom themes whenever possible

The Physical Education program is developmental and skill-based. Through movement the students learn how to activate and control the many ways in which their bodies move. Students practice skills through frequent repetition.

Examples of skills include:

Manipulative skills – throw, catch, kick, dribble, strike
Balance, coordination – tumbling, animal walks, partner activities
Locomotor skills – run, hop, skip, jump, gallop
Social skills and positive self-concept – cooperative games
Spatial skills and body awareness – creative exploration
Sense of rhythm – dance, parachute, lumni stick play, rope jumping

First and second grade students are encouraged to use the library for its quiet space, to treat library materials responsibly, and to enjoy books. The main goals of the library program are to have students gain an appreciation for a “good story” (literature appreciation), and to recognize that information can satisfy one’s curiosity (information literacy). Children can begin to be able to find resources independently in the library and do more involved tasks such as online book searches. Children are encouraged to enjoy themselves while observing library etiquette so others can concentrate and use their time well.

Examples of Library skills include:

Select books of interest at appropriate reading level
Use illustrations to acquire a greater understanding of the story
Recognize when information is needed and describe what type of information can be used to solve a problem or answer a question
Sort information in meaningful ways

Jordy’s Charles River Point of View

I love that my students get to show their understanding through large-scale collaborative projects. My co-teacher and I develop engaging and innovative ways for our students to interact with the curriculum and teach our students truly what it means to be engaged and thoughtful world citizens.

Jordy Hertzberg
Co-Teacher, The Highlands

Theresa's Charles River Point of View

CRS children are given the opportunities to engage in hands-on activities that promote exploration, creativity, investigation, deep thinking, hypothesizing, and questioning. Watching their faces light up and hearing them say: “I get it!” is one of my favorite moments at CRS.

Theresa Leone
Co-Teacher, The Highlands

Jen's Charles River Point of View

We measure achievement in many ways. We see it in daily fluency work where kids track their own progress on a graph, the first time a child includes a vowel in every word, or when a child tries to talk through their ‘upset” with a friend without the help of a teacher.

Jen Worthington
Co-Teacher, The Coast

Classroom Themes

“Scientists and Inventions”

In first grade, students explore Scientists and Inventions. In this theme, students dive deep into the study of science and consider it from an interdisciplinary approach. The theme operates under the following essential questions:

What is a scientist and what do scientists need?
What are inventions and why do people invent?
How do inventions impact the world?

We begin the year by considering what science is and how scientists think. Using the book series Zoey and Sassafras by Asia Citro as both a whole-class read-aloud and a source of inspiration, we become scientists ourselves by performing simple experiments and engaging in the scientific process – lab coats and thinking goggles included. We then move to examine simple machines as the building blocks of inventions. We explore, compare, contrast, and research objects of the past with modern technology – a radio with an iPod, a rotary phone with a cell phone. The children also learn about chain reactions and discover how cause and effect work. Shifting the focus to the science of engineering, we study biomimicry and how scientists of the past have found inspiration in the natural world. Students then put their scientific thinking to work by studying water as a natural resource and considering how issues of social justice connect to different communities access to clean water.

“Communities”

In second grade, students dive deep into the study of anthropology and how anthropologists think. The theme operates under the following essential questions:

Who am I?
Who are we? What is a community?
How do communities thrive?

This theme focuses on the various communities in our lives, considering how communities thrive and the difference between thriving and surviving. We begin the year as anthropologists, which are scientists that study people and cultures. Anthropologists are curious, open to the world, and seek to understand humankind. Throughout this theme, students will interview, observe, question, and explore different people and other communities that inform their lives in order to draw conclusions about lifestyle, habits, and beliefs. We explore ourselves and how we identify, noting our similarities and differences before expanding to think about the diverse communities that are important in our lives such as home, school, town, neighborhood, state, social communities, country, continent, world, and the geographic environment of each – growing to understand how everything is connected.

Welcome to Our First and Second Grade Classrooms