Language Arts Home

 Vision:  The Beauty of Language, the Diversity of Human Knowledge

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.

Units of Study

Third Grade

Reading

Humorous / Realistic Fiction

Non-Fiction

Biography / Autobiography

Fantasy

Poetry

Fables

Writing

Personal Narrative

Poems

Persuassive

Letters

Biography

Feature Article

Grammar and Mechanics

Synonyms

Antonyms

Homonyms

Homophones

Prefixes

Suffixes

Compound Words

Contractions

Subject and Predicate

Parts of Speech

Punctuation

Capitalization

Fourth Grade

Reading

Animal Fiction

Biography

Realistic Fiction

Historical Fiction

Writing

Poetry

Memoir (personal narrative)

Ghost story (fiction)

Holiday Tradition (personal narrative        

Wonder Cloud Essay (Non-fiction essay)

Narrative (with dialogue)

Persuasive letter

Book reviews

Children’s book (written with Ms. Haaga)

Grammar and Mechanics

Capitalization

Punctuation

• End punctuation
• Commas
• Apostrophes
• Semi-colons
• Colons
• Dashes
• Hyphens          

Parts of Speech

• Noun      
• Verb
• Adjective
• Pronoun
• Adverb
• Conjunction
• Preposition
• Interjection

Subjects

Predicates

Subject-Verb agreement

Possessives

Fragments

Phrases

Clauses

Run-on sentences

Quotation marks

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