Middle School Language Arts
Our Middle School (6-8) Language Arts program offers a progressive curriculum in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Students read and respond to a variety of diverse texts promoting global understanding to include poetry, fantasies, myths, short stories, plays, contemporary and historical fiction, and expository (informational) selections. Learning comprehension strategies, their understanding goes from literal to inferential, basic to insightful. Students learn strategies such as summarizing, paraphrasing, identifying main ideas, and outlining to not only comprehends informational text but to use it effectively in written and oral presentations. Writing instruction focuses on six traits (ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions) as students are guided through the writing process. Beginning with the development of a strong paragraph with a clear controlling idea, supporting details, and an effective conclusion, students progress to the construction of well organized multi-paragraph essays. Students also write poetry and narrative selections where they apply what they have learned about those genres' features during reading instruction to their own writing. The middle school language arts experience culminates with a major, multimedia research project.