| ACADEMICS | |||
| English | |||
Students work intensively in reading, writing, speaking and listening during the course of each week. Solid foundations in grammar, word usage, mechanics, spelling rules, and vocabulary development prepare students for effective written and spoken communication. Sixth grade grammar emphasizes the parts of speech, the building blocks of language, and how words work together to build effective sentences. In order to improve verbal communication, students participate in oral presentations, storytelling, poetry reading, literature discussion groups, oral reading, and composition sharing. Activities include personal experience stories, “how to” demonstrations, and book reviews. Literature discussion groups encourage critical thinking and active participation. Goals include recognizing the importance of setting, methods of characterization, use of description, and details of plot. Students work toward an understanding of theme, not just what happened, but why the author wrote the story. In addition, students build reading fluency and comprehension through a variety of read-aloud activities. Students have a minimum of one hundred minutes of required self-selected reading per week. Books are selected from the thousands of titles in the Accelerated Reader program. Students take an Accelerated Reader computer quiz after each book they read. The purpose of this independent reading is to instill a nightly habit of reading and, most importantly, to create life-long readers. In-class compositions promote writing fluency – ease of writing with elaboration, and provides the basis for learning and practicing the writing process: prewriting, revising, rewriting, editing, and publication. Forms of writing include narrative, descriptive, and expository pieces as well as poetry. In the sixth grade, student writing focuses on what they know best: themselves! Students compile a collection of autobiographical writing that is bound and on display for the Academic Fair. Additionally, students practice research and reporting skills through a plant or animal species project done in conjunction with their ecology class and in preparation for their mid-year trip, the Trek. Language Arts 6 | Language and Composition 7 |
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