The first year of elementary school

A child’s school career is important to everyone. As a parent or teacher, you want to help your child succeed in the first year of school. This page will give you access to the essential knowledge of the first year of elementary school. What’s more, it gives you unique access to valuable resources to support your child’s progress. In short, this page is a guide to reviewing the first year of elementary school. It’s all based on the Quebec Education Program, available on the Ministry of Education and Higher Education of Quebec[1].

 

French revision first year of cycle one: spelling in use

Your child should :

  • Recognize the letters of the alphabet and name them in order. Here’s a link to practice
  • Identify vowels (a, e, i, o, u, y) and consonants (the other letters of the alphabet).
  • Understand spelling marks such as accents, cedilla, umlaut, hyphen and apostrophe.
  • Learn to read and write words. The following sounds need to be recognized: an, ou, o, in, oi, on, ch, eu, è, é, k, s, z. Syllables, the letter position rule, the letter g, the letter c and silent letters are all part of the learning process. The following sites are two excellent resources to guide you and introduce your child to reading and writing:
  • Reading and writing sounds.

 

Here’s a story for your child.

 

Learning about grammar and the agreement system

 

The student should be able to :

  • Identify the signs that delimit a sentence: the capital letter, the period, the exclamation mark and the question mark.
  • Know the different ways of forming negation in a sentence

 

 

Revision of first-year conjugation skills

 

The child memorizes the following verb forms: to be, to love, to have, to go, to say, to do

Here’s a video explaining the verbal form to children.

 

Revision of first-year text organization

 

Your child must :

  • Be able to observe and recognize a text
  • Be able to produce a text
  • Recognize the flow of a fictional narrative

 

Vocabulary review for a first-grader

By the end of the school year, a child should have mastered writing words with the following themes:

  • The colors
  • Directions
  • The calendar
  • Fruits and vegetables
  • Body parts
  • Back to school
  • Christmas
  • Halloween
  • Valentine’s Day
  • Easter
  • Pets

 

Work on writing strategies at home.

 


 

Revision of first grade mathematics

The following concepts are for the first and second years of the first cycle. So it’s normal that your child won’t be able to master certain concepts 100%. There’s no need to stress! The aim is to provide a basic review of your child’s first year.

 

Arithmetic

 

You can review with your child:

  • Number sense

The Alloprof website gives you more details on this notion.

 

  • Fractions using concrete materials

Here are some easy-to-access objects to use to practice fractions: Smarties [or other sweets that will make your child smile], buttons, cards, pencils, etc. In short, any object your child can handle. In short, anything your child can handle.

 

  • Sense of operations on numbers: addition, subtraction, mental arithmetic, etc.

Here’s a website for your children to practice.

 

Geometry and measurement in the first cycle of elementary school

 

You can exercise your youth at :

  • Measure objects
  • Recognize types of line
  • Identify plane figures
  • Calculate the perimeter of figures

 

A video explaining how to calculate the perimeter of figures.

 

Statistics and probability for the first year

The child can calculate the probable results of an experiment. The Alloprof website offers a wide range of explanations for this section.

 

Finally, here is a page on the SOSteacher website, to make homework time easier for your children:

https://sosprof.ca/trucs-et-astuces-pour-faciliter-la-periode-des-devoirs-et-la-routine-quotidienne/

 

Find out more and get better equipped

 

Essential skills for elementary school :

 

[1] Ministère de l’Éducation et de l’Enseignement supérieur (MEES). Quebec Education Program.http://www.education.gouv.qc.ca/fileadmin/site_web/documents/education/jeunes/pfeq/PFEQ_programme-prescolaire.pdf

 

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