Middle School English
Over the three-year span that connects the renowned interdisciplinary PYP program (pk-5) with the demanding, content-based IGSCE program (9 & 10), our approach to teaching the English language is both expressive and pragmatic one; we emphasize language as a way to organize our thoughts, and to allow us to communicate creatively and effectively across the content areas.
Throughout grades six, seven and eight, students are encouraged to perceive their audience, and to speak toward that audience purposefully. In order to foster this relationship, every attempt is made to help the students’ writing reach real audiences, so that it can be read, discussed, refuted, or praised, and so that students can begin to understand the import of their language decisions.
To this end students in grade seven and eight are required to attempt to get at least one article published in the school’s tri-annual newspaper, the Red & Blue Compass, and all middle school students are involved in an array of activities which make demands of their language capabilities such as giving speeches, building public displays, or designing multimedia presentations.
There is also a formidable creative component to the middle school English curriculum. Each year students read books by authors of different sexes and from different places and are generally asked to prove their understandings in individual, creative ways, while also learning about and trying their hands at writing poems, short stories, and plays. Generally—besides their personal reading programs—students focus on one main text per trimester with some supplementary readings assigned. The main texts for each trimester of middle school English follow:
Grade 6:
The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint Exupéry
A Single Shard, by Linda Sue Park
The Cay, by Theodore Taylor
Grade 7:
Roots, (television series) by Alex Haley
When My Name was Keoko, Linda Sue Park
The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Grade 8:
The Outsiders, S. E. Hinton
Our Twisted Hero, Yi Mungol
Romeo & Juliet /The West Side Story, William Shakespeare and Arthur Laurents respectively
