English Department

Essential Knowledge and Skills

Students in Creative Writing explore all types of writing including non-fiction, fiction and poetry. Students will write daily, developing portfolios of their work in each semester. Students will study published writers and poets as models for their own work.

Indicators of Student Learning

Upon the completion of their course, students will:

Written Language

Strategies

• Write daily in a variety of modes

• Demonstrate an understanding of elements of discourse (e.g. Purpose, speaker, audience, form) when completing narrative, expository, persuasive or descriptive writing assignments.

• Revise and edit to strengthen ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency and conventions.

Applications

• Write responses to literary modes, which demonstrate an understanding of the author’s techniques

• Daily writing in a writer’s notebook

• Crafting and polishing pieces for submission to contests and publications

Oral Language

• Demonstrate through discussion an understanding of the elements of strong writing.

Reading Comprehension

Word Analysis and Vocabulary Development

• Determine word meaning through word parts, definitions, and context clues

• Determine word meaning through contextual inferences

Comprehension of literary and informational text

• Read fiction, non-fiction and poetry

• Continue to practice active reading techniques such as predicting and questioning

Identify and analyze various modes of writing

• Recognize literary elements including figurative language

• Recognize poetic forms

• Recognize the parts of a short story

• Recognize the elements of a non-fiction essay

Deliver oral response to literature

• Recite poems with attention to performance details in order to achieve clarity and aesthetic effect,and to demonstrate understanding.

Technology

• Collaborate with peers to use technology to compile and produce projects and other creative works

• Create final written portfolios

• Present written work orally at an evening performance

Assessments

Upon the completion of their course, students will:

• Final written portfolio

• Demonstrate increased proficiency in all written genres