English Language Arts
Through studying English Language Arts, our Lower School students develop a broad range of skills: reading, comprehension, spelling, punctuation, grammar, creative and non-fiction writing, speaking and listening.
The curriculum makes use of engaging fiction and non-fiction literature. We aim to develop each child’s creativity and an enjoyment of reading and writing for their own sakes.
Wherever possible, we also find opportunities to develop cross-curricular links so the children read and write for a wide range of purposes and audiences.
In Kindergarten, students' emerging reading skills are developed. They learn how to identify and isolate sounds and syllables, substituting letters to create new words and working with rhyme. Skills of prediction and comprehension are further developed, as the students read, and have read to them, a variety of texts. Through the use of emergent level texts, they learn to read an increasing number of high-frequency sight words.
As well as recognizing key words, our kindergarteners are also learning how to write and spell them. They explore reading and writing for different purposes - telling stories, communicating information, expressing feelings.
In Grade 1, students start to sound out unfamiliar and irregularly spelled words, decoding them using knowledge of root words, prefixes, suffixes, contractions and compounds. New grade-level vocabulary is tested weekly. Punctuation starts to play a role in writing activities.
The students continue to be presented with texts from a variety of genres, such as folk tales, poems, fairy tales, and informational texts.
Grade 2 sees students being able to identify and produce all letter-sound correspondences. Multisyllabic words are sounded out, knowledge of word structure increases, and antonyms, synonyms and homonyms are studied, as the students' vocabularies are expanded. Writing in script is introduced over the course of the school year.
Students are reading both informational and imaginative texts, recognizing differences among the genres of stories, plays and poems. They use their knowledge of story structure and story elements to interpret, summarize, compare and contrast.
The goal in Grade 3 is that our students are able to read over 100 grade-level words per minute fluently. Many read at a level significantly higher than this. Daily reading assignments play a continuing and important role.
Writing skills are developed as students begin to use literary elements in creative writing and convey personal voice. They also learn how to vary the formality of language depending on the audience and the purpose of the writing. Grammar and spelling continue to be studied, and the students start to write more fully in cursive.