Oak Knoll Elementary School

The Language Arts program encourages the integration of reading, writing, speaking, listening and critical thinking with the learning of language skills in meaningful context. Emphasis is on providing instruction and promoting a love of reading for all students

The daily teaching and learning activities used in the classroom ensure that:

• Students receive direct instruction according to their needs
• Students are immersed in reading and have daily opportunities to read
• Reading, writing, listening, and speaking are integrated since development in one area supports development in others.
• Reading is taught throughout the day in all subjects.

The Oak Knoll reading program contains an organized explicit skills program of phonemic awareness, phonics, and decoding skills to address the needs of the emergent reader. Students move from learning to read in to K-3 program to reading to learn in grades 4 and 5. Students must be able to read narrative and expository text fluently and accurately. They must recognize increasingly complex words, analyze idioms, analogies, and metaphors to infer literal and figurative meaning.

Oak Knoll provides a powerful early intervention program for students at risk of failure in reading. Two full time reading teachers provide one on one and small group remedial instruction

Oak Knoll employs the strategies of, Six Traits Writing, to help ensure that students learn to write clear coherent and focused essays and research projects. By grade five, students are expected to extend their writing applications as they compose narrative, expository, persuasive, and descriptive works of 500-700 words.

Students are expected to develop core knowledge in history and social science and develop critical thinking skills to study the past and its relationship to the future.

• Students place key events and people of the historical era they are studying in chronological sequence.
• Students explain how the present is connected to the past, identifying both similarities and differences between the two.
• Students use map and globe skills to determine the locations of places and interpret information.
• Students judge the significance of the relative location of a place and analyze how relative advantages or disadvantages can change over time
• Students pose relevant questions about events they encounter in historical documents, eyewitness accounts, oral histories, letters, diaries, artifacts, photographs, maps, artworks, and architecture.
• Students summarize the key events of the era they are studying and explain the historical contexts of those events.
• Students identify the human and physical characteristics of the places they are studying and explain how those features form the unique character of those places.
• Students identify and interpret the multiple causes and effects of historical events.

In addition to the skills listed above, students master standards related to grade specific curricula.

• Kindergarten: Learning and Working Now and Long Ago
• Grade One: A Child’s Place in Time and Space
• Grade Two: People Who Make a Difference
• Grade Three: Continuity and Change
• Grade Four: California: A Changing State
• Grade Five: United States History and Geography: Making a New Nation