THE ENGLISH CURRICULUM

The pages below describe how comprehensive language art education looks from kindergarten to grade eighth. Your school teaches your child how to read, write and speak. This requires systematic work in various fields such as phonics, reading, grammar, vocabulary, spelling, writing, etc. Another important objective is to show your child fiction, fiction, and poetry. We can not place sufficient emphasis on the idea that what your child reads is as important as it is readable.

For this purpose, this section includes three lists of excellent literary works for children. You may want to see how many of them are included in your school curriculum and how many in the classroom or school library are easily accessible. These lists are obviously not exhaustive; they represent only a fraction of children’s good works. Furthermore, no single read syllabus can or should be established for all schools. Everyone has his own character, his own community and his own students; everybody has to choose books. However, you should expect your school to teach quality literature on the following pages. You should see many of these classics in your school’s reading lists.

Keep in mind that language art curricula vary greatly between institutions. For example, some schools in the kindergarten do a lot of systematic phonics, while others wait for first grade. One good school can concentrate on ancient Greek mythology in the intermediate grades, the other in the junior level. Don’t expect your school’s course to look exactly like the Core Knowledge Sequence outline, an excellent curriculum used in hundreds of schools. However, compare the two generally. Talk with the English teacher, curriculum director or principal if you find many of the elements missing from your child’s education.