English
Objectives
- To encourage care and precision in writing and speaking the English language
- To foster a love of reading, and excellence in the craft of interpretation
- To promote familiarity with a variety of literary genres, styles, and historical periods
- To inculcate, by means of a pedagogy based in questioning, the skill of critical thinking
Overview
Fourth- and fifth-grade English focus on developing basic reading and writing skills. Students expand vocabulary, gain familiarity with grammatical structures, and put their knowledge into practice through frequent writing exercises (including a weekly creative writing workshop). Reading stories and novels improves students' comprehension; frequent class discussion encourages boys to acquire confidence in expressing their ideas orally.
Sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade English builds on this strong set of fundamental skills to produce highly literate, articulate, and thoughtful young men well prepared for the demands of high school. Students read a wide selection of texts, some readily accessible to middle schoolers (Samir and Yonatan, The Giver, To Kill A Mockingbird), but some distinctly more challenging (The Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Frankenstein). Students in all three grades read a Shakespeare play each year, and stage a full-length performance in the spring. Frequent in-class writing exercises combine with a variety of writing assignments (stories, letters, alternative endings, discursive essays, research papers) to help boys grow into confident and purposeful writers. Constant discussion and debate teach the boys to develop and defend opinions through logical argumentation.
Integrated and Innovative Teaching Approaches
All children love to tell and listen to stories, and the boys at PBA are no exception. In our English curriculum, we use this natural love of stories to help boys master the skills necessary to read, write, and think clearly. Fourth graders might be asked to describe a meeting with a character in a book they are reading; fifth and sixth graders to compose their own stories; seventh graders to write letters between characters in a novel; eighth graders to conduct a debate between characters in a novel. These imaginative approaches to the skill of reading comprehension culminate in the sixth- to eighth-grade boys' full-length production of a Shakespeare play (recent plays include The Tempest and Twelfth Night; next up is Macbeth), an activity which also sharpens their memories, their abilities as public speakers, and their sense of camaraderie and shared accomplishment.
Teachers also make use of the boys' musical knowledge to help them master difficult or seemingly unappealing concepts. Punctuation makes more sense to singers when presented as equivalent to musical rests: a comma as a quarter-rest, a semi-colon as a half-rest, and a period as a whole rest. Poetic meter becomes audible to the boys when represented in terms of measure, tempo, and beat. The musical concept of shape so familiar to the boys from rehearsal and performance becomes analogous to a well-expressed thought, or a logically constructed essay. General topic areas covered by grade include:
4th Grade
- Parts of speech
- Kinds of sentences
- Sentence construction
- Introduction to paragraph construction
- Elements of interpretation: setting, plot, character
- Reading for significant detail
- Recalling elements of plot
- Answering reading comprehension questions orally, and in writing
- Making predictions based on plot
- Introduction to thematic elements in literature
- Cursive
5th Grade
- Review and refined knowledge of parts of speech
- Refined knowledge of kinds of sentences
- Introduction to diagramming
- Advanced sentence construction
- Advanced paragraph construction
- Introduction to essay construction
- Review of elements of interpretation
- Advanced reading for significant detail
- Relating elements of plot to larger thematic concerns
- Answering reading comprehension questions orally, and in writing
- Drawing inferences
- Constructing alternative endings
- Cursive
6th-8th Grades
- Mastery of parts of speech
- Mastery of kinds of sentences
- Advanced diagramming
- Mastery of paragraph construction
- Advanced essay construction
- Development of logical argumentation
- Use of evidence in writing
- Expository writing
- Introduction to literary historical periods
- Advanced attention to significant detail
- Advanced understanding of thematic concerns
- Knowledge of structural elements in literature
- Knowledge of rhetorical techniques
- Advanced familiarity with Shakespeare