Language Arts

Instruction in the Language Arts at JPDS-NC, from its initial lessons in Pre-Kindergarten through graduation after Sixth Grade, seeks to embrace students in a vibrant world of words, establishing strong foundations for effective communication and inspiring the children’s enduring commitments to meaningful listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Investigations in the school’s early childhood classrooms afford girls and boys regular opportunities to express and build their evolving understanding through what the Italian educational theorist Loris Malaguzzi called the “hundred languages of children.” Guided and joined by their teachers, the children observe, draw, model in three dimensions, write, perform, inquire, negotiate, and repeat and modify their activities as they pursue journeys of exploration. The approach to learning and instruction accommodates the natural development of language skills along the broad spectrum of abilities that typically characterizes preschoolers, providing all of the students with important collaborative roles in investigations, including those whose literacy emerged early and those whose reading is still emerging, those whose inventive spelling is helping them to grasp letter-sound relationships even before they have fully learned to read and those whose growing bibliography has introduced them to some of the complex patterns of conventional spelling in the English language. The youngest children at JPDS‑NC write in journals regularly, they inhabit spaces that surround them with written and recited words, they engage in daily routines that invite them to share ideas with their peers and to listen to the thoughts of others, and they practice proper letter formation in multi-modal lessons.

The incremental step to a systematic program in daily reading instruction begins in First Grade, and the teachers’ use of Reading Street over the next two years provides them with a wide range of flexible materials geared toward emergent, transitional, and fluent readers. While encountering texts suited to individual abilities, all students work on comprehension skills, on proper sentence punctuation, and on moving along the progression from phonemic decoding to fluid oral reading with intonation and expression. First and second graders continue to draft and edit their own compositions—including narrative, creative, and expository pieces—they explore the different elements of stories, and they develop their penmanship skills using the Zaner-Bloser program.

Practices instilled in the early childhood classrooms and in the early grades at JPDS-NC continue and advance throughout the Language Arts program at our school. Teachers at all levels periodically read aloud to students, sustaining the children’s delight in well-told tales, pushing their auditory comprehension skills, and providing additional openings for communal give-and-take on texts. The girls and boys themselves join younger students in “Reading Buddy” partnerships that foster social bonds across age groups, even as they also contribute to a community culture that cherishes books. At every step, teachers sustain an expectation that children will read independently at home, exploring different genres and establishing rewarding life-long habits, and they work with students to enhance reading comprehension skills and strategies, including predicting, visualizing, posing questions, summarizing, and making connections. Classroom work also includes attention to characters, settings, plots, conflicts, themes, and uses of language; and boys and girls encounter regular opportunities to practice crafting increasingly sophisticated written responses to texts. Beginning in Third Grade, JPDS-NC students move from print to cursive in the Zaner-Bloser program, and they also work in the Sitton Spelling and Word Skills program to secure their command of high frequency “No Excuse” words and their awareness of orthographic patterns in English.

A similar commitment to honoring baseline expectations also informs instruction in creative and expository writing, even as teachers also guide young writers to reach toward more advanced composition skills. Students first encounter the JPDS-NC “No Excuse” Editing List in Second Grade, and its stipulations increase incrementally over the following years. Through a progression of varied short-term and longer-term writing projects, students acquire a full understanding of paragraphs—defining them, developing them, varying them, linking them, and refining them—and they gain experience in generating ideas and in outlining, drafting, editing, and revising their written work. Multiple assignments also incorporate opportunities for public presentation of information and ideas.

As a community Jewish day school, JPDS-NC takes particular pride in the multiple and rich ways that instruction in Hebrew and Judaic Studies enhances our students’ work in the Language Arts. Carrying forward a proud and ancient tradition deeply rooted in texts and enduringly appreciative of words and their vitality, JPDS-NC students learn to ask good questions, to consider multiple meanings, and to enhance their lives with an abiding commitment to exploring and sharing ideas through meaningful listening, speaking, reading, and writing. 

Across the Language Arts curriculum, and indeed the entire educational program, JPDS-NC maintains a commitment to offering differentiated instruction within its classrooms and to providing enrichment and some remedial instruction outside the classroom.  The school strives always, as a matter of mission, to sustain “an environment filled with warmth, joy, and intellectual excitement that celebrates the unique qualities of each student.”