Sacred Heart School junior high students experience:
- Departmentalized instruction from highly qualified, academically-specialized teachers,
- Accountability, responsibility, and organization skills required for numerous, challenging, and contiguous assignments,
- Extracurricular activities, team athletics, and leadership positions concomitant with their senior position in the school.
Junior High Language Arts
The language arts instructional approach is similar in grades six through eight, with assignments and projects of increasing difficulty. In-class reading includes four to six novels per year, anthology and non-anthology short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Lessons incorporate speaking, listening, reading and writing. This four-modality approach is grounded in academic research and supports the concept of multiple intelligences. Higher level thinking skills, which are practiced and further developed, include synthesis, analysis, and evaluation. Knowledge and identification of literary terms and techniques is expected. Students complete papers, worksheets, quizzes, tests and projects. Students are expected to read outside of class. Projects relate to the outside reading requirement.
Writing is strongly emphasized in the Sacred Heart School junior high language arts curriculum. Types of writing pieces include traditional academic formats such as research papers, five paragraph essays, and compare/contrast essays utilizing topic/thesis statements, as well as more real-world applications. “Product descriptors” provide critical elements for all assignments. The instructor is available for mini-lessons, conferences, guiding of peer conferences, and editing during writers' workshop sessions. During the remaining two class sessions per week, students focus on grammar, mechanics, speeches, spelling, and vocabulary. Activities and games extend the concepts and utilize group dynamics, a specialty of junior high students.
