📚 8th grade English Language Arts

Units

1. Unit 1

   🔍Close Reading

   Reading original short passages and answering questions about theme, tone, word choice, inference and the author's purpose, using evidence from the text.

   Benchmark: 8.1.4.1; 8.1.4.2 · citing the strongest evidence, and how themes develop

2. Unit 2

   🎭Literary Devices

   Naming devices like simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, irony, foreshadowing and symbolism in short excerpts, and identifying a narrator's point of view.

   Benchmark: 8.1.8.1; 8.1.5.1 · word choice, analogy and allusion, and narrative point of view

3. Unit 3

   🔤Word Study

   Using prefixes, suffixes and Greek and Latin roots to work out unfamiliar words, reading context clues, and noticing how word choice changes feeling.

   Benchmark: 8.1.8.2 · word parts and the effect of word choice in academic texts

4. Unit 4

   🎭Irony, Satire & Allusion

   Telling verbal, situational and dramatic irony apart, spotting how satire uses exaggeration to criticize, and explaining what an allusion to a well-known story adds to a text.

   Benchmark: 8.1.8.1; 8.1.6.2 · irony, satire and allusion, and how modern works draw on older ones

5. Unit 5

   🗣️Whose Story Is It?

   Recognizing third-person limited and omniscient narrators, spotting clues that a narrator is unreliable, and thinking about how a story would change from another character's point of view.

   Benchmark: 8.1.6.1; 8.1.5.1 · how an author develops point of view, and comparing narrators

6. Unit 6

   📰Forms, Patterns & Visuals

   Comparing text forms such as editorials, news articles, poems and graphic novels, spotting text patterns like problem-solution and compare-contrast, and judging how features, images and design add to meaning.

   Benchmark: 8.1.5.2; 8.1.5.3 · informational text structures and what visuals add

7. Unit 7

   🔎Reading Detective

   Making and checking predictions, choosing a strategy when reading gets tricky, drawing local and global inferences from clues, and summarizing the main ideas of complex texts.

   Benchmark: 8.1.2.1; 8.1.4.2 · monitoring understanding while reading, and summarizing central ideas

8. Unit 8

   📱Digital Citizens

   Staying safe and respectful online, protecting privacy, spotting misinformation and disinformation, understanding how feeds are curated, and thinking about audience and purpose in digital and media texts.

   Benchmark: 8.1.9.2; 8.3.3.2 · judging online sources for bias and credibility, and sharing digital work

9. Unit 9

   ✍️Write It Better

   Choosing the right form and tone for an audience, using reliable sources and giving credit, building voice, acknowledging other perspectives, and revising, editing and proofreading drafts.

   Benchmark: 8.2.3.1; 8.2.1.1 · revising, editing and proofreading

10. Unit 10

    🔤Precise Words & Spelling

    Children use word families, prefixes, suffixes and spelling rules, choose precise words for a subject, and use word-processing tools to format a document.

    Benchmark: 8.2.3.2; 8.2.1.1 · precise, concise words and correct spelling

11. Unit 11

    📡Media Influence

    Children explain the purposes of media messages and the techniques behind them (appeals to emotion, logic and credibility, editing, subtext, sponsorship) and how feeds and echo chambers affect people's reactions.

    Benchmark: 8.3.3.2; 8.1.7.1 · persuasive media and whether its reasoning is sound

12. Unit 12

    ⚖️Weigh the Evidence

    Children judge evidence and sources for accuracy, logic and fairness, spot fallacies and weak statistics, check content made by technology and combine sources with proper citations.

    Benchmark: 8.1.9.2; 8.1.7.1 · whether sources and evidence are relevant, sufficient and credible