English
A quality education in English strives to teach excellence in reading, writing, listening, and speaking through the sequential study of language and literature. At every level, English and language arts classes teach students to read with depth of understanding, to write with clarity and impact, to listen carefully, and to speak effectively.
Each year stresses improvement in such skills as finding the main idea, distinguishing important details, using reference materials, taking notes, and organizing. The writing of papers provides formal practice in transferring those skills into a student's own expository and creative work.
Starting in the earliest grades in Lower School, reading skills are developed through a balanced literacy approach, utilizing phonics, whole words, and children’s literature. Though the writing process, and the “Writing Together” program, children learn to express themselves freely, fluidly, and confidently. Facility with the written word is fundamental to academic success, and the children write every day. They keep journals, write poems, essays, and research reports, and publish their own newspaper and chapter books, the importance of spelling, grammar, and fluid writing is stressed, as is the pleasure of reading for fun and the beauty of written language.
Middle School English is taught through the structured study of writing and grammar, as well as through a developmental literature program. In the former, students learn how to organize sentences, paragraphs, and essays. Not only do they write expository papers, but they also write creatively, capitalizing on their own fresh responses to what they read and on their new sense of language as metaphor. In the literature program, students study authors’ use of language to depict action and motivation. They discuss the inferences beyond the most literal level of plot; they begin to assess the impact of any work of art on life.
The Upper School English program asks students to look at different life experiences, to hear other voices, to imagine how it would be to live in other times and places, though extensive reading in fiction, drama, poetry, and non-fiction, students acquire a sense of the extraordinary breadth of world literature of an understanding of literary styles and devices. The program integrates knowledge and skills so that students can make connections and build on what they already know in order to achieve a more mature understanding of themselves, of communicating with others, and of the world around them.
