US homeschool curriculum · 1st grade
1st Grade Language Arts
A self-paced online Language Arts course for 1st grade: 30 lessons across 7 units. A short placement quiz finds the right starting point, practice adapts as your child answers, and every lesson is marked automatically with progress reported to you.
- Every lesson has at least two different question styles, with hints and step-by-step worked solutions.
- Struggling triggers a gentler re-teach and a warm-up on the missing building block — never a visible drop in score.
- Work this course at its own level: a child can take 1st Grade Language Arts alongside a different grade in Math.
What your child learns
The scope and sequence below is generated from the live curriculum, so it is always what the app actually teaches.
Phonics and word reading
- Spot alternative spellings of a vowel sound: Can find a word with the same vowel sound even when it is spelled differently (rain, play, cake).
- Read words with -ment, -ness, -ful, -less and -ly: Can read a word made from a root word and a common suffix.
- Read 1st grade tricky words: Can read further tricky words such as because, children, beautiful and people in a sentence.
- Read contractions: Can say which two words a contraction such as didn't or we're stands for.
Spelling
- Spell 1st grade tricky words: Can spell tricky words such as because, could, people and beautiful.
- Change y to i before -es and -ed: Can spell words like babies, cries and copied by changing y to i.
- Drop the e before -ing, -ed, -er and -est: Can spell words like hiking, hoped and nicer by dropping the e.
- Double the consonant before -ing, -ed, -er and -est: Can spell words like running, hopped and bigger by doubling the last letter.
- Add -ment, -ness, -ful, -less and -ly: Can add a suffix to make words like kindness, careful and happily.
- Choose the right homophone: Can choose between words that sound the same, such as there/their, here/hear and to/too/two.
- Spell words with silent letters and tricky graphemes: Can spell words with kn, wr, dge, soft c, -le and -tion.
- Write contractions: Can write the contraction for two words, putting the apostrophe where the letters are missing.
- Write the possessive apostrophe: Can write 'Tom's hat' to show that the hat belongs to Tom.
Grammar
- Find the noun phrase: Can pick out a noun phrase such as 'the small, furry kitten' in a sentence.
- Statement, question, exclamation or command: Can say whether a sentence is a statement, a question, an exclamation or a command.
- Join with and, but or or: Can choose and, but or or to join two ideas.
- Join with when, if, that or because: Can choose when, if, that or because to join two ideas.
- Past or present tense: Can choose the verb form that matches when something happens.
- Use is, are, was or were with -ing verbs: Can choose is/are (now) or was/were (in the past) in front of an -ing verb.
Punctuation
- Commas in a list: Can pick out the sentence that uses commas correctly to separate items in a list.
- Put the apostrophe in a contraction: Can pick the contraction with the apostrophe in the right place.
- Missing letters or belonging?: Can say whether an apostrophe shows missing letters or belonging.
Vocabulary
- What a suffix word means: Can match a meaning such as 'without hope' to the word hopeless.
- Choose a stronger word that means the same: Can choose a word that means the same as a given word, such as enormous for big.
- Work out a word's meaning from the sentence: Can use the rest of the sentence to work out what a new word means.
Reading comprehension
- Work out how a character feels: Can use clues in the text to say how a character feels.
- Find a fact in a non-fiction text: Can answer a question by finding the information in a short non-fiction text.
- Say what happened next in a story: Can say which event came straight after another in a story.
Writing
- Proofread for mistakes: Can spot the sentence with no spelling, grammar or punctuation mistakes.
- Choose an adverb to describe how: Can choose the -ly word that best says how something was done.
Language Arts uses American spelling, punctuation and conventions throughout. It is not mapped to the Common Core ELA standards — the lesson list above is the honest description of what it teaches.