English Courses
English 8
This course is designed to provide a deeper look at the analysis, reading, and writing in preparation for College and other career goals. This is a writing and reading-heavy class. We read and analyze various literary and non-fiction texts to facilitate discussions and provoke meaningful writing and research. Students will encounter higher-level questions and learn to use text-based evidence to support their writing claims. Students will be thinking critically in this class.
English 9
This course is designed to prepare students for the New York State Regents exam in English 11. We practice intensive reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills beyond the surface level. We focus on various texts, including short stories, personal narratives, Shakespearean plays, Young Adult Novels, poetry, and more. We write creative narratives, short responses with textual evidence, Argumentative essays, Literary Analysis essays, and more! These skills enhance students’ future experiences in and out of the classroom.
English 10
This course is designed to cover a variety of genres, structures, and styles of reading pieces. As the year continues, we look to improve reading skills to go beyond surface-level analysis: less questioning, predicting, and commenting - more inferencing, drawing conclusions, and synthesizing. Students will utilize reading strategies to tackle higher-level literature pieces, typically making it more difficult, regardless of level. Writing will vary from formal to informal; students will work to write at a more advanced level, varying word choice, sentence structure, and other elements to create a smoother, more complex piece of writing.
English 11
This course is designed to be the final step in preparing your students for the ELA Regents Exam and the SAT, which they will take at the end of the year. We practice argumentative writing, close reading skills, and analysis of various text types. We read fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry and analyze these different kinds of writing for more profound meaning and practice using evidence from the text to support various claims. In English 11, students will also fine-tune their close reading skills, which they have honed in English 9 and 10, practice multiple-choice question strategies, and use logic to eliminate lousy answer choices. We also begin getting ready for the SAT at the end of the year.
English 12