Grade 10 academic English is a reading and writing course with a performance in the middle of it. Most periods you will be reading closely, drafting, or arguing about a text with other people.
The shape of a period
| Part | Roughly | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Opening | 10 min | A passage, a question, or a piece of writing on the board |
| The work | 50 min | Close reading, drafting, seminar, workshop — the class page says which |
| Landing | 10 min | What we established, written down before it evaporates |
The class page for each day says what the period is. Read it before you arrive and you will never be lost.
Four habits this course assumes
- Annotate as you read. The method is on Close Reading, and “I read it” without marks on the page is not a defence at this level.
- Come with a claim. Seminars and discussions start where you already are; arriving empty means listening to other people learn.
- Draft early, revise late. Every major piece is drafted in class, read by somebody, and rewritten. That sequence is not optional.
- Read the criteria before you start. Every task page publishes them in advance because they are meant to guide the work, not to explain the mark afterwards.
The literacy test
Everybody in Grade 10 writes the provincial literacy test this year. This course prepares for it deliberately rather than pretending it does not exist — see The Literacy Test — and the preparation is genuinely the same skill as everything else: read carefully, write clearly, prove your point.
Phones
In the tray at the door unless the class page says otherwise. Some periods the phone is the tool — filming a scene, researching a claim, recording a seminar — and the page will say so.
Curriculum connection
A1.1
identify the purpose of a variety of listening tasks and set goals for specific tasks (e.g., listen to a teacher read a prose selection aloud in order to identify how the rhythm of the sentences enhances the mood; clarify and extend the ideas of others in a class discussion; synthesize information from a guest speaker’s presentation)
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B4.1
describe a variety of strategies they used before, during, and after reading; explain which ones they found most helpful; and identify detailed steps they can take to improve as readers (e.g., describe the strategies they used in reading a short story and explain how the strategies were helpful; use a Venn diagram to identify which strategies are useful at a particular stage of the reading process and which are useful at more than one stage – or at all stages)
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