The Language Arts Program  is focused on expository reading and writing. It allows students to have ample 
opportunity for close reading and persuasive writing while interacting with fiction and nonfiction materials. Close reading is a careful and purposeful re-reading of the text several times, each time looking purposefully at the text to discover answers to specific questions, to find evidence to support a viewpoint, to discover an author’s organization, to explore an author’s style, and to read against the grain. Persuasive writing is all about teaching students the “writing moves” that professional writers make so students become active and proficient participants in the important spoken and written conversations of academia and the world outside the school walls. It’s a rigorous, rhetoric-based, three-year program, with classes reading and responding to progressively more complex texts as they advance from grade 6 through 8.