First grade writing, grammar and spelling

First grade is the year sentences become real. Texas asks for complete sentences with subject and verb agreeing, correct end punctuation, and capital letters where they belong. Spelling moves from sounding out to patterns: short vowels, blends, digraphs, and a list of words that have to be known by sight. Composition is still short. A story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and a paragraph that stays on one subject, is the whole target. Free covers this year fully. The paid programs buy you a spelling sequence and a scripted dictation ladder.

• K
• 1st
• 2nd
• 3rd
• 4th
• 5th

What to aim for this year

By the end of first grade, a child working at grade level can usually do these.

• Prints all upper and lowercase letters legibly, with correct formation, spacing, and consistent size.
• Writes complete sentences in which the subject and verb agree. This is the first-grade editing standard in Texas, word for word.
• Capitalizes the first word of a sentence, the pronoun I, people's names, and dates.
• Uses a period, question mark or exclamation point correctly at the end of a sentence.
• Spells words with short vowels, consonant blends, and digraphs, plus a growing bank of high-frequency words.
• Adds -s and -es to make plurals, and uses singular and plural nouns correctly.
• Joins two short sentences with and or but to make a compound sentence.
• Uses adjectives and simple prepositions in his own sentences.
• Writes a short story with a beginning, middle and end, and a short informational piece on something he knows.
• Rereads his own writing aloud and finds at least one thing to fix.
• Names the topic in the first sentence so a reader knows right away what the piece is about.
• Writes an opinion piece that names the topic, states an opinion, and gives a reason.
• Writes an informational piece that names a topic and supplies facts about it.
• Uses time-order words to keep the events of a piece in sequence.
• Ends a piece with a closing sentence instead of stopping in the middle.
• Writes and punctuates the four kinds of sentences: telling, asking, commanding and exclaiming
• Uses pronouns in place of a name so the same noun is not repeated
• Spells words with a final silent e that makes the middle vowel say its name
• Uses verbs that show past, present and future, including will for what has not happened yet
• Spells short one-syllable words that double a final f, l, s or z
• Tells the print letters b and d apart by which stroke each one starts with.
• Forms all uppercase print letters, sorted into the four families that share the same strokes.
• Starts every print letter at the correct point and moves in the correct direction, because a letter formed the wrong way cannot be written quickly later.
• Sets up posture and paper position for writing, tilting the paper the correct way for the writing hand.
• Recognizes that the printed a and g in books have a different shape from the a and g written by hand, and that both are the same letter.

Teach it here

These rooms teach it on this site. No sign-up, nothing to buy, and they work with the internet switched off. Start here. Everything below is a fallback for when you want more than the app gives you.

• piece — A whole short piece of his own: put three things in the order they happened, give a real reason for what you think, say something true about a topic, pick the opening that makes somebody read on, write three sentences in a box, and tell revising apart from editing. It reads his piece back to him afterwards.
• sentence — Everything a child writes, built by tapping tiles rather than typing: spell a word from its letters, build a heard sentence from word tiles, choose the mark that ends it, join two halves with the word that makes sense, pick the sentence that covers a whole paragraph, put the paragraph back in order, and find the one thing that is wrong.
• write — Letter formation as a stroke with a starting point and a direction, not as a shape to copy. Capitals and small letters with numbered dots, then which of the three lines each letter touches, then the print families (c a d g o q, l i t j, v w x y z k) from memory with the start and the direction checked, his own first name with no model, digits, and finally any letter on a blank line.
• blend — Systematic synthetic phonics with decodable words, which is the same skill first-grade spelling runs on in reverse.
• tracing — Letter formation practice for a child whose printing is still shaky.
• stories — Read-alongs with syllable-chunked highlighting. Useful for hearing word parts before spelling them.
• endings — One or more than one, -s or -es by the extra beat, and the words that double a final f, l, s or z, all built from tiles.
• grammar — Join two sentences with and or but, choose the describing or position word a drawing proves (on, under, in, next to), put he, she, it or they in place of a name, and tell what already happened, what is happening now, and what will happen.
• marks — Capitals and punctuation put in by hand: he taps the gap where each space, period, comma, apostrophe or quotation mark goes, and taps the words that need capitals. Seventeen steps from spaces between words in kindergarten to capitals for names, days and months, apostrophes, commas in lists, dates and addresses, a letter's greeting and closing, dialogue, compound and complex sentences, commas around extra information in fifth grade, and a comma that changes what a sentence means ("Let's eat, Grandma!").
• notes — The shape of a short piece: he hears three sentences and picks the one that names the topic to go first, then picks a closing sentence that finishes the thought instead of stopping in the middle.

What a week looks like

1. Four days, ten minutes of handwriting, moving from single letters to words to short sentences as the year goes.
2. Four days, ten to fifteen minutes of phonics and spelling, staying on one pattern for the whole week rather than a new one each day.
3. Three days, one copywork sentence from a fable or a rhyme. He checks the capital and the end mark himself before you look at it.
4. Two days, he retells a story you read and you write down his first two sentences while he watches you do it.

If you want more, free

A fallback, not the plan. Every one of these costs nothing, and the license tag says what you may actually DO with it, which is a different question from whether it is free to read.

• The Good and the Beautiful, Language Arts Level 1 Free Openly licensed

  Free full-year PDF course book with Reading Booster cards and books. Handles phonics, early grammar vocabulary, and short writing tasks in one place, so there is only one thing to open each morning.

  License: Free to download and fully copyrighted, not openly licensed. Personal use with your own children only.

• Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA), Grade 1 Free Creative Commons Not confirmed

  Free grade 1 Skills units covering sound-to-letter work, handwriting, and sentence-level writing, plus Knowledge read-alouds that give a first grader something worth narrating about.

  License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, version 3.0 Unported on the documents I checked. Adapt and share with credit. No selling it or anything built from it, and ShareAlike carries forward to whatever you make.

• McGuffey's Eclectic Readers and Eclectic Spelling Book, 19th century editions Free Public domain Not confirmed

  Graded reading and spelling books from the 1800s. Genuinely useful as a source of clean, short copywork and dictation sentences. The phonics sequence is dated and the content is Victorian, so mine it rather than follow it.

  License: Public domain in the United States for the 19th century editions. Modern reprints, revisions and new introductions can carry fresh copyright, so take your text from a public domain scan rather than a paperback off the shelf.

• Progressive Phonics Free Openly licensed Not confirmed

  Free printable phonics readers with matching handwriting and word-building sheets. Useful when a first grader needs more repetitions of one pattern than his main program bothers to give him.

  License: Free to download and print, copyrighted, not openly licensed. Check the terms for anything beyond printing at home.

• Aesop's Fables and other short public domain texts on Project Gutenberg Free Public domain

  A fable is about the right length for a first grader to hear, retell in his own words, and then copy one sentence from. That is three exercises out of one short text, and the supply never runs out.

  License: Public domain in the United States for the Gutenberg editions. Print, copy, retype and adapt freely. A modern translation of an old work can carry its own copyright, so use the Gutenberg text rather than a recent edition.

And the paid programs, honestly

Nothing here is required. These are the programs families most often ask about, with the real drawback of each one named rather than skipped.

• All About Spelling Level 1 Paid $64.95 per level, plus $25.95 letter tiles and $17.95 review box as one-time buys. Verified at the publisher, August 2026. Prices change.

  Good at: Rule first, word list second, with tiles the child physically moves. Nothing advances until it is solid, and review of old material happens automatically instead of being something you have to remember to schedule.

  Drawback: Fully parent-led every day. The tile work is slow, and it gets slower with more than one student. Seven levels means the program can still be running well past fifth grade.

  Suits: A child who spells by guessing and needs to be shown that English has reasons.

• Handwriting Without Tears Grade 1, My Printing Book (Learning Without Tears) Paid Roughly $12 to $18 for the student workbook. Approximate; check before ordering.

  Good at: Short daily pages that do not overload a small hand, clear stroke sequences, and a page layout with nothing on it to look at except the work.

  Drawback: Not much practice per letter for a child who genuinely struggles, so you will end up adding your own paper. The teacher's guide is priced separately and most homeschoolers skip it, which loses the actual method.

  Suits: A first grader whose letters are formed correctly but still messy.

• Writing With Ease, Complete Level 1, Revised Edition (Well-Trained Mind Press) Paid Roughly $35 to $50 for the all-in-one revised book. Consumable student pages are sold separately for around $20 if you need a fresh copy for a second child. The older original edition is cheaper but is not compatible with the revised one, so do not mix them.

  Good at: Four short days a week of copywork, narration, and dictation, already scripted with the passages printed right there. Open the book and teach. The revised Level 1 is one book, lessons in the front and student pages in the back, so there is no second purchase to figure out.

  Drawback: The passages come from older children's literature and some kids find them dry. The core four days deliberately avoid original composition, which frustrates parents who expected stories by Christmas. The revised edition does add an optional fifth-day creative writing exercise, which softens that a little.

  Suits: A parent who does not want to plan writing and wants the lesson script handed over.

• Explode the Code Books 1 and 2 Paid About $11 to $14 per student book, based on the current price of Book A in the same series. The teacher's guide is separate and covers several books at once.

  Good at: Cheap, independent, and it makes the child write the phonics he has been reading rather than only recognizing it. Useful for the fifteen minutes you need to teach someone else.

  Drawback: A pure workbook with no instruction in it. It reinforces; it does not teach. Some children find it monotonous by Book 3.

  Suits: A second thing to do, never the main thing.

• Spelling You See, Level B (Jack and Jill) Paid About $65 at the publisher for the complete set, which is the instructor's handbook plus both student workbooks. Retailers list it closer to $73. The student workbooks alone run about $50. Checked August 2026.

  Good at: Copywork and dictation instead of a Friday list test, which suits a child who freezes at tests. The daily passage doubles as handwriting practice, so one sitting covers two subjects.

  Drawback: It does not state spelling rules, so a child who wants the reason gets no answer. The color-chunking system is unusual and some children never take to it. It also costs a good deal more than most people assume.

  Suits: A first grader who melts down at a spelling test.

Prices are approximate and change often. Check with the publisher before you buy. We describe and link to these programs; none of their material is hosted here.

The rest of first grade