English Language Arts Department

Welcome to the home page for the English Language Arts Department. Here you will find information about standards, curriculum, projects, helpful links, and more! Thanks for visiting!

ELA Standards

California State Standards
Common Core Standards

Course Descriptions

7th Grade Language Arts

Language Arts skills in 7th grade focus on literary response and analysis, reading comprehension, conventions of writing and spelling, and intensive work on writing strategies, applications across the curriculum, and grammar.

8th Grade Language Arts

Language arts skills focus on literary response and analysis, reading comprehension, conventions of writing and spelling and intensive work on writing strategies, applications across the curriculum, and grammar.

Honors Language Arts (8th grade only)

Honors Language Arts is a rigorous course designed to challenge our most capable students. The California Association for the Gifted recommends depth, complexity, novelty, and acceleration as strategies to meet the unique needs of high achieving students. Students will explore the curriculum described above in Language Arts in greater depth and will be expected to demonstrate a higher level of mastery in their application of the skills and knowledge acquired in their course of studies. Teacher recommendation is required for placement in Honors Language Arts.

Honors Criteria

Course Materials

Humanities Handbook
Recommended Reading List
Pathfinders for 8th Grade Persuasive Paper

Cool Links for Language Arts

Wordle - create beautiful word clouds
Tagxedo - create beautiful word clouds with images
Poetry 180 - A collection of 180 poems for teens
Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus - a new way to look at language
Magnetic Poetry - create funny or pretty poems on a virtual refrigerator
FontCapture - create a font from your own handwriting
Iambic Pentameter - write a poem in the famous style of William Shakespeare

Academic Competitions

English Department Staff

Allison Neser (7th & 8th), Department Chair
Azzie Estrada (8th)
Diane Sjogren (7th)
Katherine Holcomb (7th)
Reeve Hartman (Sheltered)
Anna Berger (SDC)