The fifth grade curriculum introduces students to more sophisticated literary analysis and augments their understanding of the structure and grammar of English.
The reading serves as both a pleasure and a primary source in the study of history. Students come to a meaningful understanding of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance through studying these texts. Students build analytic skills by answering study questions, learning how to annotate a text and by crafting brief essays and completing a number of creative assignments.
Students reinforce their knowledge of grammar through revising their own writing and by completing lessons in the grammar workbook. Students also build vocabulary from their workbook and by learning new words from the reading in English and history.
The sixth grade English program strengthens students' analytical skills and focuses on understanding the art of storytelling. Students consider the role stories play in our sense of personal and social identity. In at least one essay, many in-class paragraphs, and multiple creative writing assignments, students incorporate various methods of analysis to interpret stories, poems, and excerpts from a text. Students begin the year by reading short creation myths from around the world and analyzing the structure of the story. Blending understanding with creativity, students take the elements they learned to write their own myths and then analyze their writing process in a reflective paper. The poetry unit looks at memoirs in verse. The class reads and discusses the different poems and writes their own poetry. This process helps them further develop both their analytical skills and their creative writing. Finally, students explore character analysis through the study of historical fiction, then express that understanding through creative and reflective writing assignments. In addition to the study of stories, storytelling, and writing, students study vocabulary and grammar in the context of writing. A final component to sixth grade English is the exchange journals, which encourage to students to write about topics that intrinsically matter to them.
The seventh grade English curriculum helps students to develop their interest in reading critically and their ability to express themselves clearly and imaginatively in writing. Students define writing as a process that involves understanding purpose and audience, then gathering evidence, focusing, organizing, drafting, revising, line editing, correcting, and proofreading. Students practice these skills on a wide range of assignments that include writing essays, poems, short stories, newspaper articles, and journal entries. Students often enjoy using multiple intelligences and modalities to demonstrate their creativity in written assignments. Vocabulary work includes exploring a variety of relationships between language and meaning. Students are also encouraged to identify unfamiliar words in context as they read. On the weeks when students are not studying vocabulary, a new grammar or usage concept is introduced using English Workshop: Course I.
The eighth grade curriculum guides students toward becoming careful readers and articulate writers and speakers. Students focus on the meaning and crafting of the course texts and also work on their own writing, both analytic and imaginative. In addition to constructing complex essays, students write and revise short, analytical paragraphs and complete a number of creative assignments. Students become more sophisticated critics of their own work and better able to construct an argument, to muster apt evidence to support it and to choose precise language that allows them the pleasure of expressing their thoughts in depth and detail. Students read short stories and poetry from a variety of perspectives, excerpts from All Quiet on the Western Front, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and short memoirs. Eighth graders also craft a worldview essay in the spring. Throughout the year, they study grammar and vocabulary and take a number of assessments to help them with mastery.
Grace Church School is a co-educational independent school in downtown Manhattan, New York City providing instruction for over 800 students in junior kindergarten through twelfth grade.
