Uruguay Primer Grado (1st Grade) School Syllabus - Literature and Language

This information is derived from the official "Educación Básica Integrada (EBI) Programas 1.er ciclo" document published by ANEP (Administración Nacional de Educación Pública) of Uruguay.

Language and Literature Development:

The curriculum emphasizes developing communication skills through speaking, listening, reading, and writing, fostering creative thinking, and building an understanding of literature. It focuses on oral language development, exploring different languages, and engaging with various forms of literature. The curriculum aims to build confidence, mastery of standards, and college and career readiness.

Spanish Language Arts:

• Orality: Narration in everyday and playful contexts, both physical and virtual. Use of paralinguistic elements in oral communication such as gestures, voice, tone, intensity, speed, silence, and gaze. Expressing opinions in various situations and providing reasons. Following guidelines for assertive communication, including turn-taking, appropriate vocabulary, organization of ideas, and forms of address. Memorization of texts like riddles, poems, songs, and tongue-twisters.
• Reading: Teacher-led reading of model quality texts. Independent reading practice. Constructing meaning from texts, including identifying the theme, keywords, order of ideas, explicit and implicit information, non-linguistic resources, and cultural components.
• Writing: Undifferentiated, pre-syllabic, and syllabic-alphabetic writing. Exploration of graphic gestures using various spaces, media, and instruments. Alphabetic writing and phoneme-grapheme relationships. Syllables as rhythmic units. Combining vowels and consonants to build meaningful units: morphemes and words. Word families and derivation/composition processes. Words and sentences as primary units for recognizing meaning and structure. Punctuation: period, comma, exclamation, and question marks. Capitalization. Singular and plural forms. Gender and number agreement.

Second Languages and Foreign Languages:

• Focus: Connecting with others and the immediate environment through games, songs, and teacher-spoken texts in the target language.
• Activities: Performing tasks and actions using iconic elements and creativity. Understanding classroom routines and instructions with iconic, paralinguistic, and everyday phrases, supported by the teacher. Recognizing and naming elements of the immediate environment through music and teacher guidance in the target language. Recognizing words and phrases related to lived experiences. Ordering and sequencing actions with teacher guidance and iconic resources. Orally reproducing songs, rhymes, and poems. Showing curiosity about words and phrases for communication in the target language.
• Communication Functions: Introducing oneself and others. Naming objects. Expressing feelings. Locating information in concrete text formats.

Literature:

• Focus: Developing cognitive processes during story reception, fostering narrative awareness, experimenting with imagination, and developing emotional responses to literature.
• Genres: Realistic stories, fantasy stories, picture books, fables, national classic stories, and comics. Songs, rhymes, and puppet show scripts.
• Elements: Titles, characters, objects, repetitions, and the complementary relationship between words and illustrations. Realistic and fantastical elements, temporal connectors, personification, and morals. Verse, rhyme, sensory language, nature themes, dialogue, and scene setting.
• Activities: Expressing expectations about character behavior, making inferences, identifying similarities across fictional works, constructing and expressing story sequences, combining ideas from literary works to generate new alternatives, creating new rhymes or stories, and expressing empathy or rejection towards characters.