First Grade: September 8-12, 2025

First Grade

Sep 12

Dear First Grade Families,

Here we are in the sixth week of school! Our Day of Courage festival is nearly upon us, and students are on the cusp of a well-earned break. The class concluded their first Language Arts block last week; over the course of the block, they enjoyed several fairy tales, learned to form the uppercase letters M, V, D, B, N, and G, played with phonemes (letter sounds), practiced their listening skills, and built their block crayon drawing skills. During their time beyond the Main Lesson, students have gotten acquainted with their class chores, using their will force to sweep the floors, dust the shelves, water the plants, and organize supplies. One of the favorite chores is crayon cleaning! Although students have new crayons that are still nearly immaculate due to their careful usage and proper storage in crayon rolls, the community crayons had been rubbed together in a basket and were in need of cleaning. First Grade set to the satisfying task of rubbing yellow block crayons with coconut oil to make them spiffy and squeaky clean once again. This “will work” builds on students’ experiences in early childhood that increased their capacity for persistence, a quality that will propel them forward through life!

Beyond the realm of will development (birth through approximately age seven), children enter into a new phase in middle childhood: the “heart” or feeling years, between ages seven and 14. Guided by loving authority, which makes children feel most secure and confident, they learn best at this age when permitted to imagine and create. When their souls are fed with beautiful imagery from sources such as the natural world, exploration of form and color through art, and listening to traditional tales, children can reach their full potential in their “feeling life”. With regard to artistic activities, in addition to daily crayon drawing, the children have now had two successful watercolor painting sessions. In the first, they painted swirls of yellow followed by swirls of red to make varying hues of orange and peach with traces of the original two colors. The second painting was inspired by the full moon at the beginning of the week: simply painting with blue around the middle of the white paper (the negative space). The range of results was delightfully diverse. Some students were intent upon making as perfect a circle as possible, while others ended up with different shapes; some painted a smaller area to achieve greater negative space, while others did the opposite; some saturated their paper with deeper pigment, while others painted lightly for a more translucent effect. The class proudly displayed their collection of moons that looked big and close to the viewer or far, far away! Moons with craters and moons with dark clouds scudding across their faces. Is it not amazing how evocative the work of young children, those careful observers of nature and color, can be?

Announcements & Reminders:

Parent/Teacher Conferences are October 9 and 10th. Please sign up here: First Grade