Reading

Early Reading Readiness

Our early reading program provides basic reading skills to students in kindergarten through second grade, or to older students needing review. Students benefit from an integrated approach to reading that combines phonetic instruction and literary activities. The program focuses on word attack skills, vocabulary development, character analysis, predicting outcomes, literal and inferential comprehension, and analyzing author's intentions. Students improve decoding skills, increase vocabulary and comprehension, develop inferential skills and read effectively with a critical eye, and identify the author's purpose and points of view are goals. Students are taught to examine the story elements (setting, characters, problem, events, and resolution) of a book. Also, students are encouraged to read at home.

Academic Reading

Our Academic Reading program teaches students strategic reading skills that play an essential role in all areas of school and life. Emphasized is placed on the four key components of reading fluency:

• Phonics and Word-Recognition: Skills necessary for decoding new or unfamiliar words.
• Vocabulary: Synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, prefixes, suffixes, root words, and words in context. New words are taught which enable expansion of existing vocabulary.
• Comprehension: Students build lower-level, literal comprehension skills and steadily progress to more complex, inferential, comprehension skills. Emphasis is placed on the nine essential skills--working with words, using the context, getting the facts, drawing conclusions, identifying inferences, following directions, location the answer, getting the main idea and detecting the sequence. The combination of short reading passages selected to capture student interest, followed by consistently formatted exercise questions, promotes rapid skill acquisition.
• Applied Skills: Develop and reinforce comprehension through increased reading rate and improved reference and oral skills.

Advanced Reading Skills

This program helps students refine their reading comprehension skills by increasing understanding while actually reducing the amount of time spent on schoolwork. This program focuses on five main comprehension skills: getting the main idea, making inferences and drawing conclusion, interpreting context clues, grasping significant facts, and paraphrasing and summarizing. Students:

• Increase reading skills
• Develop greater comprehension and concentration
• Gain higher achievement in studies and on standardized tests.

Language Arts

The development of oral and written communication is integrated across all subject areas. Mechanics, proper grammar, vocabulary development, spelling, and proof-reading skills are taught and practiced as student’s writing portfolio which is passed from grade to grade. Students practice improving cursive writing. As keyboarding and word processing skills develop, the computer becomes a more effective tool for writing.

Writing

The writing curriculum focuses on a variety of writing formats and styles, including narrative, descriptive, expository, persuasive essays and other forms of expressive writing as well as understanding of the major concepts of correct writing and sentence structure. It increases confidence in the student’s writing abilities through learning and practicing essential writing skills from pre-writing to the revision process. Students are exposed to various writing exercises which include poetry, non-fiction story writing, and play writing. Emphasis is placed on grammar, spelling, word usage, vocabulary building, outlining, paragraph structure, and effective reports, business and creative writing.

English 4-8

This course reinforces student’s skills in grammar usage and mechanics, in composition and in reading comprehension through the study of short stories and novels.

English 9-10

This course is a review and continued study of grammar usage, composition and literature. In literature emphases is placed on theme, plot, characterization and other important literary concepts.

English 11-12

This course is a survey of English Literature. Students focus on a chronological study fro the medieval period to the modern. A full range of poetry, drama and fiction is included. Emphasis is placed on written analysis and evaluation of selection read.

Competence & Confidence in Reading and Writing

This course focuses on developing competence and confidence in writing through reading. Writing exercises, use, and punctuation of elements of a sentence, recognition of sentence patterns, and construction of unified paragraphs and compositions. (Suitable for ESL students wanting to make the transition into Regular English classes.)

English Honors 9-11

English Honors provides students with a rigorous language program that develops confidence, competence, flexibility, and enjoyment of listening, speaking, writing, reading and thinking. The program emphasizes and fosters the interrelationship that exists among the language processes.

Student performance is evaluated in many ways. Understanding is tested through discussion, critical papers and written tests and examinations. Students write narrative, critical and creative pieces, including poetry and journals. Writing is collected in files, kept by the current teacher so students can evaluate the growth they have undergone. The ability to write a sustained, critical essay is important and helps prepare students to achieve well in the standardized tests available to them in the SAT and AP's.

Registration Forms

Interested in enrolling at the Kendall Park Learning Center? Click here to go to the Admissions page, where you can download a variety of registration forms and materials