Learning at Rashi
Kindergarten - Grade 2
Our overarching objective is for students to become strong and effective communicators who express their views with knowledge, conviction, and skill.
Language arts at Rashi focuses on building and enhancing students’ skills in reading, writing, speaking and listening. As students progress from kindergarten to eighth grade, they discover – and treasure – their experiences ability to become powerful communicators and to express their own voices.
Rashi’s Language arts program is aligned with the Massachusetts state frameworks. Our reading and writing programs are a compilation of best practice discourse on Readers’ and Writers’ Workshop. The spelling program in grades K-5 derives support from Rebecca Sitton’s Spelling Sourcebook Series. The Project Read approach helps students learn phonetic rules.
Language Arts Emphasis
The entire Rashi curriculum promotes the practice of reading, writing, speaking and listening skills. Teachers expect, and students employ, excellent written and oral expression in social studies, science, math and Jewish studies. Students exercise repeatedly the literature study skills of analysis, close reading and interpretation of symbolism as they discover the wisdom and treasures in the teachings of TaNaKh (Torah, Prophets, Writings).
The building blocks of reading and writing are established in the lower grades. This early journey includes phonemic awareness and the ability to notice, consider and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. As fluency develops, readers can focus their attention on understanding meaning, and on finding rich connections between the text and their background knowledge. In every subject area, skill development in listening, speaking, reading and writing continues.
The language arts program supports differences in learning styles and readiness levels. Students are able to develop skills at their own pace yet at the same time they are held to high standards and expectations. We place a strong emphasis on sound grammatical skills, correct punctuation, excellent spelling and a rich and varied vocabulary.
Readers’ and Writers’ Workshops continue through the grades, while teachers reinforce handwriting skills, rules of grammar, and the essentials of being an effective speaker and a polite and empathetic listener. In the upper grades, students’ writing becomes more expressive and structured. Students craft, revise, edit for conventions and word choice, and write in response to literature, for research purposes, and to support a thesis. Through this writing process, students enhance their literary appreciation and analysis skills as well as their penmanship and typing abilities.
Walk the halls of Rashi and witness our communicators in action. View students in a reading corner immersed in “just-right” books, reading and writing folktales, conferencing about reading and writing with teachers and peers, performing student-written fables, engaging in parent-student book discussions, waxing lyrical in the words of Shakespeare, or vigorously and critically debating issues of forgiveness… this is the rich Language arts program at Rashi!
