Reading and writing skills are arguably the most important of the many skills taught in school. Adults know their importance. They know that proficiency with accessing and generating the written word often mean the difference between success and failure, in both academic and professional life. Schools have an obligation to help young people discover the importance that reading and writing can bring to their lives. This is a significant challenge. In many schools this challenge is compounded by the size of the teaching load being carried by hard-working English teachers. It is difficult to attend to the diverse needs of too many students and teachers do what they can.

At Brewster Academy's Summer Session we use the advantage of small classes and a unique, intentional curriculum to focus on the relevance of reading and writing to the lives of our students. Within this context of relevance, we meet each student where he or she is in terms of reading and writing skills and help each build on those skills toward proficiency in a sequential skill-building program.

As writers, we teach our students the essential skills of sentence and paragraph building; of "showing vs. telling" of supporting generalizations with specifics; of using precise language; of building a variety of strong sentences; of meeting the needs of readers for clarity, coherence, completeness; of revising for grammatical correctness and grace of expression. Starting with personal writing, students move on to writing about the literature they read in the course.

In reading, our goal is to help students become active, engaged readers. They are taught how to interact with a text and seek out the clues that will lead to understanding. They practice identifying both explicit and implicit information and drawing inferences from this data. They are taught how to make predictions and to make the necessary connections from textual evidence to help them read with understanding. Further, they are helped to appreciate how the written word from both student and professional writers can bring new meaning to their own lives.