Home Curriculum English Language Arts
Language Arts at Park Day focuses on empowering students to read, write, listen, speak, and debate their ideas. We strive to foster intellectually curious, independent thinkers who use literacy to make sense of the world.
Story Plays
Over the course of the school year, students craft stories with partners, incorporating peer feedback to develop engaging characters, clear narratives, and meaningful messages. Later, selected stories are transformed into plays, with students taking full ownership of the process including designing and crafting their own props, sets, and backdrops. These plays are performed for the entire lower school, staff, and families, showcasing their creativity and collaboration.
Magazine Project
Throughout the year, 5th graders develop their writing skills through a comprehensive magazine project on a topic of their choice. They explore editorial and persuasive writing, craft poetry, conduct interviews, write profiles, short stories, feature articles, and create advertisements. This project hones their drafting, revision, sequencing, organization, editing, proofreading, and research skills, culminating in a final magazine that showcases their growth as writers.
A Wish in the Dark
6th graders read A Wish in the Dark by Christina Soontornvat, a novel that deals with issues of privilege, protest, class, carceral systems, and justice set in a Thai-inspired fantasy world. After large and small group discussions to help guide abstract and representational thinking, students write a literary essay identifying motifs and themes, and create a project in the Innovation Workshop to visually represent that theme, and how it connects to their own world.
Mock Trial
Students read The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and participate in a mock trial, using the novel as their anchor for evidence. Assigned roles in prosecution, defense, or unbiased positions, they collaborate to build cases with textual evidence. This project hones their essay-writing, evidence-citing, and persuasive argument skills, culminating in a dynamic experience that showcases their analytical abilities.
In Lower School, through direct and implicit instruction, students develop oral and written vocabulary, learn the decoding and encoding skills needed to construct meaning, and become practiced in how to best communicate their thoughts and ideas. Teachers take a structured literacy approach that places emphasis on phonological awareness with a systematic phonics approach using Fundations and leveled reading assessments along with other regularly scheduled formative and summative assessments. Writing occurs daily in the classroom through journaling, research reports, learning logs, persuasive paragraphs, descriptive paragraphs, and essay construction.
In Middle School, students engage in multiple types of literary analysis while flexing and improving their writing and persuasive skills. The curriculum is comprised of written responses to literature, character analysis exercises, expository writing, persuasive writing, creative short story, and more. Park Day’s progressive approach also includes mock trials, literary re-enactments, writers workshops, peer review, and the Harkness method for student led class discussions. Hands on projects that require students to dive deeply into the material and develop personal connections to it help spark creativity and connection.
Peer and teacher feedback plays a pivotal role and revising and editing is considered an integral part of the learning process. Throughout the grades, teachers use individual instruction, small discussion groups, individual instruction, small discussion groups, guided annotation strategies, and class activities. Students learn to respond emotionally and intellectually to what they read. Most importantly, they are encouraged to lose themselves in books, and find their passion on the journey to becoming lifelong readers.