Grade 1 Math Curriculum in North America: What Children Learn

Grade 1 is the year math starts feeling like school math. Children move from counting and early number sense to actual operations, and they start writing and solving simple equations. Here is what Canadian and US Grade 1 curricula cover, and what it looks like week to week.

Addition and subtraction

• Adding and subtracting within 20 fluently.
• Understanding addition and subtraction as inverse operations.
• Solving word problems involving adding to, taking from, putting together, and comparing.
• Using strategies: counting on, making ten, using known doubles.

Place value

• Understanding two-digit numbers as tens and ones.
• Reading and writing numbers to 100.
• Comparing two-digit numbers using greater than, less than, equal to.

Measurement and time

• Comparing and ordering objects by length.
• Measuring with informal units (paper clips, blocks).
• Telling time to the hour and half hour on analog and digital clocks.
• Recognizing coins in your region.

Geometry

• Distinguishing between defining attributes of shapes (number of sides) and non-defining (color, size).
• Composing larger shapes from smaller ones.
• Partitioning circles and rectangles into halves and quarters.

What to watch for at home

By the end of Grade 1 your child should be comfortable with addition and subtraction within 20 — not fast necessarily, but confident. They should be able to read and write two-digit numbers and have a sense that 47 is bigger than 32 because of the tens place, not just because of memorization. If those pieces are shaky, they are the first things to shore up before Grade 2 arrives.