The language arts program fosters a deep appreciation for the beauty of language while honing the student’s own reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. Our students are given a solid foundation, consistent opportunities, and the resources to develop the language skills they need to pursue life’s goals and to participate fully as informed, productive members of society. Our students learn to express themselves with clarity, logic, persuasiveness, creativity and accuracy. By reading thoughtfully in a wide range of print and non-print texts, students gain access to the diversity of human knowledge. By writing and speaking articulately, they are able to add to it, respectfully challenge it, publish it and celebrate it.

Student Goals

Students will:

• Learn to read for various purposes (study, research, entertainment) and demonstrate comprehension through discussion and writing.
• Identify literary genres and story elements (plot, character, setting, and theme).
• Apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g. sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).
• Build vocabulary from diverse content areas.
• Become adept at the writing process by employing a wide range of strategies as they compose to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.
• Learn Standard English grammar, the parts of speech and spelling via focused writing practice.
• Demonstrate competence in using speaking and listening as tools for learning.