About Us

Everyday, teachers of Language Arts K-12 work to create independent readers, competent writers, discriminating viewers, active listeners, articulate speakers, and critical thinkers. This is no small task. In fact, this responsibility belongs to every educator and every content area. But it starts with Language Arts, where we provide our students with the foundational tools they need for success in anything they do. 

Literacy is learning; to become literate means to become a lifelong learner who has access to information and opportunity. What does it mean to be literate? A literate voter? A literate taxpayer? A literate scientist or historian or violinist? 

Literacy instruction goes far beyond helping children learn to decode words. As students encounter increasingly difficult text, they need strategies for understanding, questioning, and evaluating what they read. Likewise, in addition to learning to spell and write sentences, they need to learn to take a stand and express themselves clearly and coherently, and support what they say or write with reliable evidence. And they also need direction in what we call "The New Literacies," which include navigating, prioritizing and filtering the vast onslaught of information that comes at them with lightning speed, and using technology as a responsible and effective vehicle of communication.

In our English/Language Arts Department, we believe that every child in Glastonbury needs and deserves an opportunity for mastery of these skills, and we work on them with our children from kindergarten through their senior year in high school. We provide instruction in these skills through our great love: literature. We celebrate and share fine examples of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, memoir, short story, essay, film and video, and more, and use them to inspire our students in high quality expression of themselves. 

As Language Arts teachers, we are lovers of language and learning, and we chose this work because we wanted to share that love with our students.