English

Aims/Objectives

The grades 6-8 English courses are designed to encourage students to plan, write, discuss and edit their own ideas independently. Students will also become skillful, insightful readers, viewers and listeners by encountering a wide variety of texts.  
Specific language skills are developed in terms of register, technical accuracy and fluency. It is the aim of the YIS English Department to foster a life-long appreciation and enjoyment of literature.
 

Skills

Students will be able to read, write, speak and listen in a variety of genres and for different purposes. The development of specific language skills is integrated into units of study as appropriate and according to the needs of the students in mixed-ability groups.

Assessment

These skills are assessed against the English subject criteria, these are:
(A)    Ideas, (B) Structures and  (C) Style & Language.

Folios of formally assessed work are maintained that are designed to help students, parents and teachers track the progress of student learning. 

In order to give the students the chance to demonstrate real understanding, they complete a range of assessments, both formative and summative, over the course of a year. These may take the familiar form of essays written in class or at home, or the mandatory end of year examination that normally focuses on comprehension and literary analysis skills.  However, assessment can also include a range of interpretative, expressive and creative tasks in the form of artifacts like posters, magazine articles, short-films, comic strips, transformations of stories, diaries or imagined responses to fictional contexts.

Course Descriptions

Grade 6 English

Grade 6 units include a study linked to Gary Paulsen's novel ‘The Hatchet', an author study based on the work and ideas of Roald Dahl, a poetry unit and a media unit entitled ‘Does the news matter?'

Grade 7 English

Grade 7 units include a studies linked to Ian McEwan's novel ‘Daydreamer' and Sandra Cisneros's collection of vignettes ‘The House on Mango Street'. They also study a drama text, non-fiction and poetry.

Grade 8 English

Grade 8 units start to look towards the language and literature challenges the students face in high school and include novel studies of S. E. Hinton's ‘The Outsiders' and David Almond's ‘Skellig'. They also tackle a Shakespeare play and this year constructed short documentary films in a cross curricular environmental unit with science.