This class will help you develop your English skills by reading and writing short fiction and non-fiction stories. Your understanding of each will be checked. Being able to understand what is happening in a story is a key skill required in the SATs. In this class, you will read the provided texts and then we will read through them together. We will discuss what actually happened which will build your inference skills. You will learn about sentence structure (nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, pronouns etc) and how to put your imaginative skills into writing.
Inference is the ability to extract relevant information so that you can answer questions about what you have read. It is learning how to deduce what is meant by 'reading between the lines', being able to identify the key characters, finding phrases or words that tell you about something particular in the story, giving synonyms for certain words, and being able to describe a character. You will learn how to think critically by reasoning why a character does or says what he/she/it does or says and give ideas of what may have happened previously or after the story takes place. You will find connectives, explain why the text is organised in the way it is, explain why some sentences are shorter than others, find powerful verbs, find amazing adjectives, deduce what words mean by using the text that surrounds those words, describe what kind of story you are reading (is it a traditional tale, a fantasy story, some other kind of fiction, or non-fiction).