English: English is the medium of education and is also taken as the First Language.
The First Language Program focuses on six strands:
- Listening skills
- Speaking skills
- Reading and Writing skills
- Vocabulary
- Grammar
- Usage
Learners learn to respond to information and literary texts with understanding and enjoyment, critically analyse texts, and communicate confidently in a range of settings, both formal and informal.
Reading and Writing skills include poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fiction texts. Students learn to develop skills of writing stories of various genres like fables, folk tales, historical fiction, fantasies, mysteries, adventure, etc. ; poems of various kinds on a variety of themes; non-fiction genres such as journal entries, newspaper reports, scientific articles, brochures, pamphlets, advertisements, biographies, etc.
Reading Program: The Reading Program at KC is both exciting and comprehensive, beginning right from Kindergarten, with early exposure to fiction and non-fiction texts. Students are encouraged to read a wide genre of books both at school and home. Apart from graded reading programs, the pupils in Pre-primary and Early Primary years are exposed to a broad range of books both from their class libraries and school library. Every term, the school prescribes some “term books”, which the students explore throughout the term with their teachers. Work on the term book is inter-woven with skills of writing, vocabulary and grammar that are prescribed during the course of that term.
Apart from books written by popular Indian and Western children’s authors, right from Later Primary years, students are exposed to global classics of all-time great authors including Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and Shakespeare. Both as prescribed reading, and books that students can pick up from the library, they are exposed to a wide range of genres including Fiction such as Fables, Folk tales, Science Fiction, Adventures and Mysteries, Historical fiction, etc., and Non-fiction such as Reports, Biographies, Autobiographies, Journals and Encyclopaedias. Complexity and depth of the texts increases over the years, focusing on building felicity on par with First Language learners globally.
Over the years, students show their comprehension and appreciation via a plethora of skills such as summarizing, inferring, comparing, contrasting, predicting, identifying author’s purpose, identifying main idea and details, reading logs, analyzing writing style and engaging in reader’s theatre.
Second Language
Most of our students are bilingual and culturally we believe that, in India, we have great adeptness with learning multiple languages. Research has proven that bilingualism has many cognitive advantages. Bilingual children are better in cognitive processes such as problem solving and attentional control. Therefore, we encourage early exposure to a Second Language at school.
In Kindergarten all students are exposed to listening and speaking skills in both Tamil and Hindi.
Beginning Year 2 (Grade1), students choose one language from Tamil, Hindi or Spanish. Apart from continuing to focus on listening and speaking skills right through Primary and Secondary years, a range of reading and writing skills are also developed right from Year 2 by following a systematic, progressive approach to make learning a language an enjoyable and culturally enriching life experience. Reading program in Second Languages include exposure to a wide range of texts both as in class and online resources. Writing kills, as in the First Language program, also aims at developing thoroughness in writing various genres.