The basic objective of our Language Arts program is to help children grow in their facility to use a living and evolving language and to realize the beauty and power of the English language as an instrument of expression. Teaching language arts, therefore, should be regarded as a functional subject rather than as a subject matter to be learned apart from its daily use.
The several different aspects of the language such as reading, speaking, listening, writing are interrelated and are the basic channels of communication by which the work of the world gets done. As teachers we realize these closely allied aspects in a child's use of communication; therefore, it is our function to guide his or her language development by relating writing, reading, speaking, and listening in our day to day instruction.
Some phases of the language arts program cannot be appraised by specific and final measures: such things as attitudes, habits, and appreciations, we feel, are as important as the learning of content. However, these values seldom lend themselves to a formal uniform program or to objective measures of evaluation, and we need to continually strive as a department to ensure that we are affecting these in a positive fashion and for each teacher to develop a personal means of measurement of his or her students' progress in these areas. In the end, we do not simply wish to pour in facts and knowledge to be measured by tests and essays, but rather seek to use our discipline as a means of developing the whole child, one who is aware of the beauty of our evolving language and who has developed a positive system of values to help foster a better world for upcoming generations.