Welcome! This year’s program will provide: a college-bound vocabulary program that includes analogies, roots, prefixes, and suffixes, and reading comprehension skills; the Spelling Connections program to teach students to recognize the importance of spelling in thinking, writing, reading, vocabulary, and technology; The Making Meaning program to teach comprehension strategies and social development; Prentice Hall Writing and Grammar to guide students through each step of the writing process with an emphasis on revision, grammar practice, and academic skills.
Additionally, many lessons will interplay between reading and writing, i.e. reading like a writer and choosing readings to support our writing lessons. These lessons focus on gathering ideas, getting organized, writing drafts, revision, editing, and polishing. Writing units include writing to explain, to persuade, writing about literature, narratives, reflective writing, and a poetry and drama unit.
The focus of our literature program is on making connections, questioning, visualizing, inferring, determining importance, and synthesizing the literature we read. Furthermore, the seventh and eighth classes will study story elements and understanding literary terms and devices, as well as Discovering Voice, lessons to guide students toward a better understanding of voice in literature and how it makes reading more interesting and writing more distinctive. These lessons include a study of diction, detail, figurative language, imagery, syntax, and tone. Our literature lessons include literary analysis, comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, writing, and assessment. Upper school students read a variety of literature as well as a short story unit, multicultural anthologies, a classic novels unit, a study of Shakespeare, and an ongoing unit on figurative language terms and definitions.