The Island School, a private school on Bainbridge Island, offers an engaging second grade program for students from the Kitsap Peninsula, including Poulsbo, Suquamish, Indianola, Kingston, Hansville and Silverdale.
Our school provides an excellent academic education as well as the social/emotional learning (SEL) that is just as critical to a child’s lifelong success in building relationships with others. Social/emotional learning has been part of our educational program since The Island School was founded more than 40 years ago because, in our community, teaching children to be kind, respectful and inclusive is as important as teaching reading, writing and math. It is part of our mission to inspire in our children a lifelong enthusiasm for learning AND an appreciation and respect for themselves and others because this is education of the heart as well as the brain. We focus on the whole child, academically, socially and emotionally, while celebrating what makes each child unique.
The goal of our language arts program is for students to develop communications skills through reading, writing and oral language development.
Reading
Our goal is to support each child on the path to being joyfully literate. We want to promote independent and confident readers who know what they like to read. We use the Wired for Reading curriculum to work on decoding, spelling and vocabulary. We work on reading fluency and expressiveness through our weekly Poetry Notebooks, reading aloud to peers and adults and reader’s theater activities. A major focus of our program is helping the children to develop strong reading comprehension skills. In whole group, small group and one-on-one settings, we teach the children to make connections to their reading, to ask questions, to make predictions, to retell stories and to write about what they read.
Reading Workshop activities include:
- Wired for Reading lessons
- Independent reading
- Buddy reading with peers
- Cross-age reading (5th grade learning buddies)
- One-on-one reading with teacher and adult volunteers
- Reader Response (writing about reading)
- Poetry notebooks
- Whole class studies may include:
- Series Study
- Theme Study
- Author Studies
- Dialogue Study
- Non-fiction Study
- Daily read-alouds
Writing
Most children entering our second grade already love to write. We support and foster that enthusiasm by giving children myriad opportunities and reasons to write. We want our students to see writing as an important method of communication and self-expression.
Writing Activities include:
- Weekend News
- Thank you letters
- Birthday letters
- Reader Response (writing about reading)
- Cross-curricular writing in math, science and social studies
Writing Workshop may include:
- Small Moments (writing from life)
- Creating setting
- Beginning, Middle, End stories
- All About Books (non-fiction writing)
- Poetry
- Free Choice Writing
- Publishing
- 6+1 Traits of Writing
Wired for Reading:
Wired for Reading is an engaging, multi-sensory word analysis program designed to improve reading, spelling and vocabulary.
In Writing Mechanics we focus on:
- Capitals
- Ending punctuation
- Mastery of K-2 Lifetime Spelling Words in daily work
- Developing automaticity (writing fluency)
- Handwriting Without Tears penmanship practice