Lower School - Language Arts

The Lower School uses a Balanced Literacy Approach with the following goals in mind for each grade:


Kindergarten

Readiness Skills: Book appreciation, sound/symbol correspondence, developing interest in reading and writing.

Reading Skills: Decode CVC words and word families, read and spell sight words from word wall, begin to understand reading strategies, participate in shared reading using big books, read-alouds, and guided reading activities.

Writing: Write sight words from word wall, writing projects based on personal experience, contribute to group writing, use basic phonics for spelling. Handwriting without Tears program, a multi-sensory approach, is begun to assist in the development of fine motor skills and the acquisition and proper formation of the upper case and lower case letters.



First Grade

Reading Skills: Whole-class guided and independent reading, phonics and decoding strategies, begin predicting and summarizing texts, self-correcting, transition from emergent to "real" reading.

Writing: Spelling, writing with a purpose considering the beginning, middle, and end of a story, journal writing, and editing independently using classroom rubrics. Handwriting without Tears continues to solidify the letter formations of upper and lower case letters.

Grammar: Punctuation use at beginning and ends of sentences.



Second Grade

Reading Skills: Reading for fluency, accuracy, and comprehension, increased phonetic understanding (vowel diphthongs and digraphs, and controlled vowels), guided reading groups with accountable talk, and reading response activities, daily independent reading, reading multiple genres and understanding the purpose of each.

Writing: Spelling and vocabulary, irregular word spellings, generate ideas for writing, planning and brainstorming using story webs, form detailed sentences, write narratives, descriptions and poetry, more complex editing, continuation of Handwriting without Tears for growth in handwriting skills.

Grammar: Punctuation, introduction to compound words, contractions, homophones, synonyms, antonyms, verb tenses, nouns, and adjectives.



Third Grade

Reading: Transition from learning to read to reading to learn, explore a multitude of genres both through classroom read aloud, independent reading and guided reading groups. Compare and contrast same author/genre books, and discuss author's craft. Work on fluency and expression, and strategies for decoding multisyllabic words in order to, read fiction texts and chapter books with independence. Work on summarization, finding the main idea and supporting details, implicit and explicit meaning of the text and the author's use and word choice.

Writing: Genre writing, cursive writing, variety of writing formats, self-editing for spelling, mechanics and presentation; use information from multiple sources in writing.

Grammar: Punctuation, irregular plurals, parts of speech, commas, roots, prefixes, suffixes, antonyms, synonyms, compound words.



Fourth Grade

Reading: Silent and independent reading, reading in book clubs, self-correction strategies, locate details in text, make inferences, summarize and paraphrase.

Writing: Narratives, literature, book reports, myth writing, responses, informational and story writing, editing story structure, spelling strategies, topic/supporting sentences, identify purpose for writing, friendly letter.

Grammar: Sentence/multi-paragraph structure, punctuation, mechanics (sentence fragments, run-on sentences, subject/verb agreement, varied punctuation), follow capitalization rules.