📚 8th grade English Language Arts: how to help at home

What each unit covers

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

13. 🤝Talking & Working Together

    Exploring and sharing thoughts and experiences, listening to other points of view, using inclusive language, working fairly in a group and giving feedback that is specific and kind.

14. 📝Plan, Form & Voice

    Children choose a text form for a purpose and audience, group ideas with patterns such as cause and effect, and match tone and voice to what they are writing.

15. 🎭Dialogue, Events and Judging Texts

    Your child analyzes how lines of dialogue and key events move the action, reveal character or force decisions, how ideas are introduced and developed in informational texts, and chooses fair criteria to judge texts and connect them across eras and cultures.

16. ✏️Arguments, Stories and Evidence

    Your child chooses arguable claims, credible evidence, counterclaims and conclusions; narrative techniques such as time shifts, relevant details and reflective endings; creative responses that explain their changes from the original; and evidence for analysis and research.