School Journal | Log 11 | English Grade 1 Topics

I am finally ready to deep dive into the school curriculum. I have decided to begin with English in grade 1. Before I can get started, I would like to outline the different topics that I intend to cover.

So, as a starting point, I will consult my google sheet which summarises the proposed curricular goals from the national curriculum framework 2023. The curricular goals outlined for languages in grades 1 and 2 together are:

Day to day communication skills

1. Appreciates simple poems, songs and rhymes
2. Writes songs and poems of their own
3. Converses fluently and holds meaningful conversations
4. Understands and repeats complex instructions
5. Understands stories and identifies character and plot
6. Narrates short stories with characters and plot
7. Vocabulary for day to day conversation and understands new words from context

Reading and writing

1. Phonological awareness
2. Knows structure of books, words, direction of reading and punctuation marks
3. Recognises all letters and uses them to form words
4. Reads stories with accuracy, appropriate modulation
5. Reads stories and comprehends their meaning
6. Appreciates choice of words in poems
7. Reads and comprehends short news items, recipes etc
8. Writes a paragraph to express own ideas / experiences
9. Shows interest in picking up and reading children’s books

All of the goals provided are focused on reaching a degree of capability in a specific skill area. That makes perfect sense. The skills to focus on developing are also rather clear. The important open questions are then:

• What sort of activities will help develop these skills?
• How to evaluate progress and provide the required feedback for learning?

At a high level the activities required to develop foundational English skills are clear. Students will obviously have to read, write and converse to get better at these skills. The more nuanced question is what sort of reading, writing and conversational activities are at the right level to enable development at this stage?

In order to find an answer to this, one could:

• Work with children of that age and learn what is most effective
• Rely on the expertise of others and existing content

I will of course continue to rely on answers which are already out there. My method of doing this will be to:

1. Pick out some textbooks for grade 1 English
2. Find some recommended books for children of that age

I will then try to pick out the commonalities in content across the textbooks and what appears to be the most useful content. I will try to piece together some activities and content which seems most useful basis these patterns. I will also try to create a reading list which might be useful in supplementing this content and help develop reading and English skills in students.

As a starting point I looked for some English textbooks for grade 1. I decided to use the following books as my base:

• NCERT (CBSE) English grade 1 textbook (Mridang)
• Reviews of ICSE grade 1 books and ICSE grade 1 English books
• Karnataka textbook society “English Reader — 1st standard” (2013–14)
• Oswaal One For All Workbook, Class-1, English

While looking for books to read for 1st graders I found this super cool reading list from K-12 reading list.

In order to identify what topics are important to cover, it will probably be useful to list out the topics covered in the above textbooks first.

There are a set of thematic topics covered for vocabulary building:

1. Family & Me — Body parts (rhyme and exercise), greetings, daily activities (phrases and conversation), objects, family members (rhyme and conversation), home (rooms and objects)
2. Life around us — Animals (name-picture), numbers (counting via rhyme and exercises), actions and activities (e.g., daily routine), fun rhymes and imagination, directions, observe and describe
3. Food and culture— Animals (pictures and rhymes), colours (exercises and stories), fruits, vegetables and flowers (stories and exercises), food dishes (stories, conversation and exercises)
4. Seasons — Seasons (name-picture, stories, exercises), rainbow/colours (rhyme and exercises)

And there are dimensional topics which are covered within the above thematic topics for skill building:

1. Alphabet — Alphabet order (song and exercises), reading and writing letters, matching letters to words, capital vs small letters, find a given letter
2. Phonetics — Exercises (common sounds in similar words), rhyming words
3. Sentence structure — Parts of a sentence (nouns, verbs, adjectives etc), rules of sentence formation (through practice, not explicit rules), punctuation
4. Reading — Practice through stories and poems, Exercises (connect story flow with pictures)
5. Writing — Exercises (complete words partially, words to match pictures, crossword, name, rewrite phrases)
6. Conversation — Stories (listen and recap), questions about stories, conversation about observations, games (matching words with actions e.g., charades)

In some textbooks instead of dimensional topics, there is a clear and repeating set of activities which are used for the same skill building:

1. Beginning: Introduction which prepares the learners to listen to or read the text.
2. Listening: Interesting activities for students to do after listening to the teacher. The listening script is given at the end of the unit.
3. Reading: Actual reading text. Serves as core activity and key practise.
4. Understanding: Comprehension questions to improve reading and listening skills.
5. Speaking: Speaking activities to strengthen conversation skills.
6. Learning New Words: Development of students’ vocabulary.
7. Practising Language: Practising language structures mainly within conversation.
8. Writing: Writing activities and practise.
9. Doing: Simple but interesting project work for students to complete after school hours. Practise sheets for copy writing, a few rhymes etc.

And now it’s time for my big takeaways. Firstly, to answer the 2 questions that I had asked at the beginning of this log.

The activities most useful to develop targeted English skills seem to be:

1. Vocabulary building lessons — Reading short stories, poems and lessons which expose students to a wider vocabulary. This reading should be accompanied with related writing and conversation. Other exercises which help drive home the meaning of words is useful.
2. Internalising grammar — Exercises to practise and develop an understanding of the alphabet, phonetics and rules of grammar. This too is best developed through exercises which involve reading, writing and conversation. However, rather than entire stories, these would focus on sentences and their structure.
3. Passive exposure to language — In addition to the more structured activities above, exposure to the language through books and movies is likely to be most effective in internalising a long list of grammatical rules and new words.

As for how to evaluate progress and provide feedback, the answer seems to lie in the exercises which are built into the first 2 types of activities. All vocabulary building and grammar focused exercises will have a clear goal for each student. The key to actionable feedback for students therefore lies in the being able to identify the gap between these goals and their current abilities.

Now, for the “so what”. From what I have seen in the resources that I have found, I will try to list out what seem like a useful and well rounded set of:

1. Topics for lessons in vocabulary building
2. Rules / ideas in grammar to develop via exercises
3. Books and movies for general language exposure

While I have noted down the topics and specific content which seem most relevant now, I have not published this list just yet. Rather, I have created this google classroom, with the framework of such topics. I will now go through each topic and try to curate and create useful content. In going through this process, I expect that my outlook on content and style will change. This is the reason that I have not attempted to publish a definitive list of topics to be covered for English grade 1.