Students will develop and broaden their knowledge and skills through reading, studying, discussing, as well as writing about literature. They will strengthen their reading comprehension, broaden their vocabularies, hone their interpretive skills, deepen their understanding of character, and enrich their moral beliefs.

 

Through the review and study of grammar and composition, students will practice skills which promote clear, effective and graceful writing. Students will demonstrate mastery of specific content, interpretive skills, varied word choice, correct spelling, and proper capitalization and punctuation. Their continued writing of structured paragraphs will enable them to recognize main ideas and to choose a topic and support it with relevants details and commentary. 

 

Required texts and reading:

Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare

A Christmas Memory, Truman Capote

Call of the Wild, Jack London

Our Town, Thornton Wilder

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith (Honors)

This course is designed to augment the gifted student's already confident use of oral and written language as well as improve her advanced reading and comprehension skills.

 

The study of sentence structures, parts of speech, mechanics, usage,  and paragraph writing are included in the language curriculum. Students will write structured papagraphs which incorporate topic, concrete, commentary, and concluding sentences.

 

Literature incorporates the study short stories, novels, poems, and plays and focuses on vocabulary, plot, characterization, setting, theme, and conflict. Authors' lives are discussed and analyzed and related to their literary works. 

 

Required texts and reading:

Tales from World Epics, John Marcatante

Nine Muses, Modern Plays from Classic Myths, Wim Colman

The Christmas Box, Richard Paul Evans

Daddy-Long-Legs, Jean Webster

The Pearl, John Steinbeck

A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith