Language Arts

Manzanita School believes that strong communications skills are essential to participation in society.  Reading, writing, speaking, and a variety of artistic media including visual arts, performing arts, and music, enable effective communication to occur.  Students develop their skills through activities that help them to become independent and effective readers, writers, speakers, and artists. 

Children see the need for communications skills through daily project work that is meaningful to them. Project work inspires children to communicate with others within and beyond the school community to research, explain, express ideas, dialogue, problem solve, and celebrate.    

Reading skills are learned through use in daily independent reading and teacher read-aloud, guided reading, shared reading, instruction in decoding skills, word study, sight word vocabulary development, dramatic play and theater, reading in a variety of genres, literature discussion, and analysis and critical thinking skill development. Some of these strategies are applied during project work; others happen in small group, large group, and individualized settings throughout the day.

The writing curriculum is based on the Six Traits model, which explicitly identifies the traits necessary for quality writing:  voice, ideas, organization, sentence fluency, word choice, and conventions.  Presentation is also considered, utilizing students' artistic abilities.  Writing is integrated into project work and Writer’s Workshop time enables students to develop writing skills by writing, revising, editing, and publishing in a variety of forms.  Systematic word study and study of grammar conventions builds communications skills.

Art as communication: The Reggio Emilia approach to education views art as a way to communicate ideas. Children are seen as active builders of knowledge who use many languages to express their ideas. At Manzanita School, students will explore many different art forms and will use various media to process and communicate their learning. Clay, watercolor, dance, theater, pastels, computer art and music software, musical instruments, digital photography, and many other media will provide students with "one hundred languages," a metaphor used by Reggio Emilia founder to describe children's innate ways of communicating.

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