The language arts curriculum, with its focus on developing students'
reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills, is designed to create
lifelong readers and effective writers. The workshop approach begun in
Pre-Kindergarten and kindergarten continues to help students with
literacy acquisition. Instruction in spelling, phonics and grammar
occurs in natural context and emphasizes the interrelationship between
reading and writing. Students develop oral fluency and listening skills
through their active participation in all classroom study.
During reading workshop, students select books of different genres,
read individually or in flexible groups, and discuss what they have
read through conferences with teachers and peers. Teachers continually
model literacy skills, such as vocabulary study, comprehension
strategies, language usage and patterns, and inferential questioning.
Three cue systems--grapho-phonics, syntax, and context--are the basis
of reading instruction. As Primary School teachers have a wide
repertoire of teaching strategies to draw upon, they can meet the needs
of the class and the individual child.
In writing workshop, students learn to write in a variety of genres.
Effectively using all stages of the writing process -pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing and sharing - enables students to
develop their written fluency. The Writing Challenge rubric serves as a
guide for honing writing skills, and it provides benchmarks for
measuring students' writing progress at the third grade level. Writing
conferences are key to revision and editing. Students focus on the
mastery of manuscript handwriting, and they go on to learn cursive.
Spelling is assessed weekly with words drawn from phonics lessons and
student writing. In third grade, students investigate root words,
prefixes and suffixes. Students are expected to apply the spelling that
they learn to their writing. Teachers help students to collect writing
samples in portfolios so they can work together to best assess growth
over time and set goals for subsequent pieces.
