Humanities Department




COURSE CONTENT

Homepage

Course Content

Research Projects

Library Research


Reading

Students will:

  • read from a variety of genres
  • identify and analyze the different elements of a story (setting, point of view, character development, conflict, climax, resolution, theme)
  • organize information with note-taking and outlining strategies
  • summarize the main idea
  • recognize figurative language in poetry and prose
  • develop vocabulary

Writing Strategies

Stages of the writing process will be used to produce clear essays with a central idea, introduction, supporting evidence, and conclusion. Emphasis will be placed on the following domains:

  • personal narrative
  • literature based analytical essay
  • problem-solution / letter of advice
  • report of information

Writing Conventions

Students will be introduced to:

  • correct sentence structure (complete sentences, sentence fragments, compound sentences, subject-verb agreement)
  • parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb...)
  • punctuation (periods, commas, question marks, exclamation marks, quotation marks, apostrophes, semi-colons, colons)
  • capitalization (beginning of sentence, proper nouns, direct quotes, titles)
  • friendly letter form
  • standard outline form
  • bibliographic form
  • spelling - frequently misspelled words (i.e. there, their, they're)

Social Studies

The five themes of geography (place, movement, location, region, human-environment interaction) will be examined through units of study selected from the following:

  • early humankind
  • Mesopotamia/ Sumeria
  • Egypt
  • Greece
  • Rome

Social Studies skills integrated with those of language arts include:

  • maps and graphing
  • geographic terms
  • note taking
  • question & answer
  • cause & effect
  • research and technology