Literature & Language Arts

Literature and Language Arts provide students an expanded road to literacy learning. This integrated approach utilizes novels, short stories and nonfiction or informational texts through which students employ good reader strategies to help them understand text. Students learn to compare, infer, and synthesize.

Novels and short stories are connected to themes that cross content areas. Within this program students use writing strategies that enable them to vary form and style in order to write for different purposes, audience and contexts. Students will write appropriate essays on a variety of persuasive, personal, descriptive and issue-based topics. 

Writing within the sixth grade includes explicit instruction on all steps of the writing process: brainstorming, drafting, revision, editing and publishing. Within this writing process, students will develop and refine their ideas for thinking, learning, communicating and expression.

The eighth grade curriculum is designed to build upon and expand the skills taught in sixth and seventh grade. The curriculum is a blend of reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar, critical thinking, listening and speaking skills.

The eighth grade focuses on strengthening comprehension, critical thinking, vocabulary development andlanguage fluency in both reading and writing. Students develop and utilize comprehension and critical thinkingskills by reading and analyzing novels in a variety of literary genres. Students expand their writing skills by taking themes from novels and writing about them.

Students' awareness of literacy, in both reading and writing, develops a solid foundation upon which they basetheir development of reading, oral and visual communication skills. Students achieve outcomes based on Core Curriculum Standards and those of the Diocese of Paterson.

The students read novels, plays and short stories, as well as preapproved free reading books. The novels, short stories and poetry enable students to develop reading comprehension and vocabulary skills. In conjunction, it provides the basis for writing in a variety of genres, with a variety of themes. The students expand their knowledge of the elements of fiction/literary terms. They reinforce reading skills and terms through anthropologies and masterpieces.

Students assess through their classwork, homework,  participation, tests, quizzes and essays/projects. All students are expected to read a “free reading book” for the first marking period, and two the following marking period. The genres change from marking period to marking period.