This year in English the high school students are covering Nonfiction texts and are doing a lot of Composition - with many of the units aligning with the Cal State ERWC curriculum - which is meant to better bridge the gap between high school and college level reading and writing demands. So far we have embarked on the following units: Writing 101 Bootcamp, What’s Next..Thinking about Life after High School, Social Media...The Double Edged Sword, Should College Athletes Be Paid?, Undercover Parent...Should Parents Use Spyware on the Kids’ Devices?, Education, and Gender. Students have been pushed in writing, in annotating articles, and in analyzing an author’s stylistic choices. Some highlights of the year were writing a Research paper on a career, engaging in a debate, and writing an appreciative letter to a teacher - thanking them for being one of the “good ones”. At the middle school level, we are currently refreshing our grammar skills by looking back at the 8 parts of speech. Earlier in the year we covered various literary units based on genre - such as short stories, nonfiction (with an emphasis on biographies), poetry, and the novel Farewell to Manzanar. We’ve also done a lot of writing, including writing a compare/contrast ancient civilizations research paper for our PBL assignment, writing an autobiographical narrative, and writing a literary analysis...among many other writing tasks! Some activity highlights this year have included writing and then giving a speech about a “buddy bio” on a classmate, composing an Alphabet Acrostic Poetry Project centered around a single theme, having students team-teach the class about a poem, and many public speaking opportunities! We’ll be concluding our year by reading the play adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank. Sharon Coffee - Upper School English Teacher
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