The school implements the Reading/English Language Arts curriculum through a balanced, formative approach to reading, writing, language, speaking, and listening. In the lower elementary grades, the school focuses on phonological awareness, word recognition, sentence structure, paragraph formation, active listening, written and oral responses, and establishes the grammatical building blocks for writing. To accomplish this, a variety of literature, such as fiction, informational text, nonfiction, poetry, and readers’ theater, supports the lessons designed to address decoding, grammar, spelling, phonics and comprehension. Online resources, iPad technology, Smart table and Smart board lesson components are used to enrich the learning process.
In the middle grades, reading/language arts literacy expands to include essay writing through exposure to persuasive, informative, narrative, descriptive, reflective, and compare/contrast genres, and through Writer’s Workshop, which provides practice in mastering the writing process. In addition, students learn to debate, write research papers and conduct interviews. Increased exposure to informational texts, novels, anthologies, mythologies, drama, poetry and other reading genres provides enrichment to the middle school curriculum.
For designing differentiated instruction for all learning levels, the school utilizes portfolio assessment, student interviews, teacher observations, and formative and summative assessments. Furthermore, utilizing reading journals, personal journals, learning centers, and Reading and Writers’ Workshop provide opportunities for differentiated instruction designed to address each student’s needs. St. Cassian also provides middle school students with Chromebooks, which allow teachers to give real-time feedback to students regarding progress on their individual learning targets. Laptop devices are also used to facilitate research, create presentations and produce videos.