Level: Form II (4th–6th grades)
Subject(s): English
Description:
Upper-elementary students will participate in activities aimed to inspire a love of words, sentences, and word-play. With the support of guided group discussion, brainstorming, and critique, students will learn to write with appropriate structure while enlivening their prose with stylistic flare.
Over the course of the year, students will gain a growing awareness of sentence structure and grammar that goes hand-in-hand with their growing ability to amplify and manipulate the parts of a sentence. We will focus on developing vivid vocabulary and sentence variety in a range of compositions including both fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. As a class, students will work on memorizing and reciting several poems over the course of the year, and they will have the opportunity to participate in ongoing reading and typing challenges to develop skills and habits essential to competent communicators.
In addition to weekly class sessions, students should plan to spend another one to three hours each week completing assignments at home.
This class will be offered if a minimum of six students is enrolled by June 26, 2021. Full tuition refunds will be made if the class is cancelled due to low enrollment.
Materials:
Supplies including the following:
- IEW student book TBD
- 3-ring notebook binder with tab dividers, course handouts, and reinforced lined notebook paper
- Composition book
- Dictionary & Thesaurus—classroom copies to share
Families will need to secure the following supplies before the start of class: (Linked brands are suggestions.)
- Pens, black ink, 2 or more
- Pencils, 3 or more, pre-sharpened and ready to use
- Colored pencils, erasable, including red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, and brown
- Erasers
- Dictionary & Thesaurus—for home use. Consider apps such as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and the English Thesaurus.
- Recommended/Optional: Reinforcing stickers for strengthening/repairing holes in notebook paper and handouts
Students will also need to be able to type, print, and email assignments using a sharable word processing program such as Microsoft Word.