8th+Grade

=8th Grade=

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Spoken and Written Language. Students adjust their spoken and written language to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences for a range of purposes and practical applications. ======

Writing Process. Students use the writing process for both informal and formal writing.
Language Skills. Students use appropriate language, mechanics and style in their written work (e.g. rich vocabulary, grammar, proofreading and editing, varied sentence structure).

__**1. Description of 8th Grade Writing Program**__ (Reflect upon goals and aims, or describe how the writing and language skills standards are applied at this grade level.)

The focus of writing instruction in the eighth grade is the essay, with particular focus on personal essays and literary exposition, in preparation for the more sophisticated analytical writing that will be asked of students in high school.

Students begin the year working on personal memoirs, building directly upon the memoir-writing they've done in seventh grade. In contrast to seventh grade, however, eighth graders spend more time on each individual essay, working through each phase of the writing process in intensive detail and paying special attention to revising the essay to focus it upon a compelling central idea.

As the year progresses, students apply the revision and editing techniques they've learned and practiced to literary analysis essays and to additional personal essays. In these essays, just as with the personal essays, the focus is on conveying a cogent thesis, and students work on supporting that thesis with organized and well-reasoned analysis of supporting passages from the text.

Students study grammar and usage in the context of editing and proofreading their own written work. During the second trimester, the course devotes several weeks to an intensive study of verbs and the construction of sentences, including action and linking verbs, active and passive voice, consistency of verb tenses, and the use of independent and subordinate clauses to create simple, compound, and complex sentences. Ultimately, students are expected to apply the grammar and usage principles they've studied to their own writing for the course.

__**2. Signature Strengths**__ The eighth-grade English course does a particularly good job of giving students intensive instruction and practice with the revision and editing phases of the writing process. The course provides students with a toolkit of principles and strategies for revising effectively. The course's unit on grammar and usage equips students with the ability to craft the language in their own writing so that it is as clear and powerful as possible.

One particularly effective strategy is the use of projecting passages from the teacher's computer onto the whiteboard to use as samples for teaching revising and editing. Initially, the teacher models the approach to revising and editing the passages, but over the course of the year, the students take over that responsibility, first by doing it as a group, and then by doing it individually, as they become more skilled in revising and editing.

The most significant problem confronting writing instruction in the eighth-grade English course is the size of the eighth grade, which affects both the size of individual class sections and the teacher's overall teaching load.
 * __3. Areas for Growth | New Directions__**

The current eighth grade consists of 75 students, with each of the four sections of eighth-grade English containing 18 to 20 students. Having a class of that size makes it difficult to find time to meet with individual students about the essays they're working on. And teaching 75 students cuts down on the amount of time that the teacher can devote to each individual student's writing. A total teaching load of 75 students represents an increase of 25 percent over a teaching load of 60 students. Thus, teaching 75 students rather than 60 means that each piece of student writing gets 25% less time from the teacher for reading the piece and writing comments on it.

Although the increased class size affects teachers in other subjects, the effect on English is particularly acute. English is the only course in the eighth-grade curriculum that meets every day. The fact that all four sections of eighth-grade English meet every day of the week means that the teacher has both more planning responsibilities (for daily lessons, for daily homework assignments, etc.) and less time to do things like planning lessons and reading and commenting on student writing.


 * __4.Addendum__**

Below is an excerpt from the syllabus for eighth-grade English:

Our reading and writing in this course will center on the concepts of identity and independence. In our reading, we’ll look at literary works featuring characters who struggle to find their own identities and achieve independence, and who discover that doing so requires them to deal with complicated questions: Who am I? Who do I want to be? Who am I expected to be? What do I believe?What do I care about? What do I hope for?What makes me who I am?

And what does it mean to be “independent”? Does this simply mean having the freedom to do as one likes? Does being independent mean not relying on anyone else? Or do we need certain things from other people? What do we owe to others in return?

We’ll look at the ways in which the books we read together address such questions, paying attention to the ways in which those works use particular literary elements and devices to raise and explore those questions. As a group, we’ll be reading and discussing the memoirs //Night// and //Autobiography of a Face//, the novels //Lord of the Flies// and //To Kill A Mockingbird//, and a play by William Shakespeare. We’ll also be doing some reading in the “workshop” model, choosing books to read on our own.

And of course we’ll be doing lots of writing of various kinds, from formal literary analysis and personal essays to book reviews and reading responses posted on the website for our course. Along the way, we’ll study and practice ways to use language clearly, precisely, and powerfully, which will include studying various aspects of grammar and writing style, as well as studying new vocabulary words. We’ll also study and practice the art of effective public speaking, learning ways to use spoken language with as much clarity, precision, and power as written language.