NCPS English Language Arts Unit Map - Grade 8

Parent Curriculum Guide

Overview:

Students in grade eight hone their skills and stretch themselves and each other through independent learning and critical thinking. They read complex texts with an analytical lens to track themes and to examine craft and structure. Students build their own understanding as they navigate through literary, informational, and multimedia texts considering the historical context and author’s perspective. Using logic and the power of argument to understand and discuss real-world issues, students showcase their thinking through a variety of learning and speaking protocols including debate, leaderless discussions, and Socratic seminars. Viewing and performing a variety of scripts, speeches, and poems ensures a heightened understanding of the text and its purpose. Students demonstrate their understanding when they select a timeless text and draw upon their learning to prepare a dynamic presentation showcasing effective speaking skills. Throughout the year, students and teachers build learning communities that understand the importance of collaboration, communication, and reflection. Practicing these twenty-first century skills prepares students for the learning experiences ahead.

Units of Study

SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER

Conflicts in Literature and in Life

Students use a variety of comprehension strategies to support meaning as they become skilled, independent, and confident learners. They analyze characters and conflict to infer theme and synthesize small and big details to grow their thinking around essential questions. Throughout this unit, students compare and contrast story elements and author’s craft within and across texts. They acquire additional tools to help them tackle more complex texts, and they apply these skills to their independent and in-class reading over the course of the year. Students share their thinking about reading through a variety of collaborative conversations and written responses. In addition, students also model effective techniques for both vignette and narrative writing, and after creating several flash drafts, they select a writing piece to bring to a final product.

Common Core Standards

RL.8.1, RL.8.2, RL.8.3, RI.8.1, W.8.3, W.8.4

SL.8.1

Students:

Track character development, conflict, and theme and explain the techniques that authors use to reveal important information.
Analyze how an author(s) develops theme through literary elements across texts with an emphasis on conflict/resolution
Fictionalize a continuation of a short story, utilizing elements consistent with author’s style.
Study authors’ styles and technique as mentors and models for independent narrative writing
Compose narrative writing (vignette) with a clear focus and a variety of literary techniques to support meaning and engage readers.
Practice writing and thinking on-demand for a series of specific tasks to develop stamina and high-order thinking.

NOVEMBER - DECEMBER

Power and Perspective

Students enhance evaluative strategies that enable them to analyze and synthesize information from a variety of texts and to make observations across texts. They identify and explore perspective and how it impacts the individual as well as the characters around them. Students engage in the complicated process of examining lopsided conflicts and discerning between power and lack of power and the impact of power on others. By exploring and analyzing poems, speeches, primary sources and literary works, students understand the role(s) that leadership, inner strength, identity, and perseverance play in following one’s convictions. After reading a wide range of complex texts, students select and synthesize the ideas and information that most resonate with them to craft written and verbal responses to demonstrate their learning.

Common Core Standards

RL.8.5*, RL 8.3, RL 8.2, W.8.9a-e, SL.8.1 a-f, L 8.3a, L 8.5.1d, L 8.6a, L 8.7.1c

Students:

Analyze and discuss how characters’ words or actions prompt reaction, reveal new angles of a character, or force a decision.
Compare and contrast the structure of two or more texts and analyze how the differing structure of each text contributes to its meaning and style (RL 8.5)
Read with an analytical lens –thinking, re-thinking, and theorizing about characters, issues, obstacles, and themes.
Summarize, paraphrase, synthesize, or directly quote to share the most relevant information from a variety of texts.
Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher led) with diverse partners on grade 8 topics, texts, and issues, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly (SL 8.1)
Respond to reading through organized written response to text

JANUARY- early FEBRUARY

Communicating Multiple Perspectives

In order to gain a deeper understanding of an event, a researcher must study different perspectives. In this unit, students read multiple genres and focus on the setting and conflict of a historical event of their interest/choice through multiple perspectives. They discuss how the author's perspective might produce accounts of events that may differ from other perspectives, and students analyze how these perspectives deepen a reader’s information or lead to new pathways of research. Students work together to understand multiple authors’ points-of-view and discuss why these differences occur through close reading and analysis of the author's craft, language, and structure. Using the 2017 Thai Caves rescue as a model, students explore new articles, diagrams, interviews, memoirs, and books by different authors to analyze how the perspectives and additional knowledge shape a consumer’s understanding. Studying, researching, and analyzing informational text structures through multiple perspectives, students will communicate their understanding of their chosen event by using these structures to present their information through a polished written and multimedia presentation.

Common Core Standards

RI 8.1, RI 8.4, RI 8.5, RI 8.6, RI 8.9*,

W 8.2, W.8, W 8.7

SL 8.1, SL 8.2, SL 8.5

L 8.3a, L 8.4a, g

Students:

Categorize material as they build and complicate their understanding of an event.
Analyze the impact perspectives and context have on a reader’s understanding of text.
Connect and analyze information from a variety of sources to make meaning of a topic or issue.
Write to develop understanding and share relevant information with attention to audience
Conduct mini research projects to learn more about an event and the impact of the time period.
Evaluate sources and select the strongest evidence to support their ideas.
Present and share multi-media presentation to an authentic audience

late

FEBRUARY- MARCH

The Art of Argument

Students read, research, and suspend judgment as they become informed on both sides of an issue. They gather, weigh, evaluate, and incorporate evidence to logically support argument. This study aims to give students practice working with multiple texts, and they come to see that different authors advance different opinions, selecting and highlighting evidence that support their argument. Students notice how authors choose words, and sequence information in order to make readers think or feel in a certain way. Students then research a selected topic and create an argument using evidence and reasons to support their claims. They write with the reader in mind and understand that developing a strong voice is essential to this type of thinking, talking, and writing.

Common Core Standards

RI 8.1, RI.8.5, RI.8.6, W.8.1 (a-e)

SL.8.3, SL.8.4,

Students:

Read and annotate texts to construct meaning paying attention to content, structure, and style.
Evaluate the approaches that writers use to argue and persuade the reader and determine which techniques are most effective.
Research a topic and take the necessary steps to organize and write an effective argument essay with claim, evidence, reasoning and counter-claim(s)
Participate in debates and other academic conversations using text –based evidence to support claims.

APRIL- JUNE

Understanding Classic Literature: The Human Condition

Students apply the reading, writing, thinking, and listening skills they have learned and focused on to understand how literature helps us define the tension between the needs of the individual and the greater good of society. Examining the decision making process, they read and view texts about characters and individuals who face big decisions and evaluate the impact of their choices. Students compose their own articulation of the human condition and explain how various texts studied this year helped them to develop this understanding. They support their position by analyzing specific characters and their actions and showcase their learning by responding to an essential question both in writing and in academic conversation.

Common Core Standards

RL 8.2, RL 8.4, RL 8.6, RL 8.9, Rl.8.3,

W.8.1/2, W. 8.4,

W 8.9,

SL 8.1 a-d, SL 8.4,

L 8.3.1f, L 8.6.3b, L 8.8.1d

Students:

Create a concept map that continues to define and build on the understanding of the greater good.
Read and analyze a variety of texts that reveal (explicitly or implicitly) the greater good.
Compare and contrast characters, plots, themes, and settings and explain how these story elements help define “the greater good.”
Analyze writing styles and literary techniques in literary works and how they impact meaning and reader engagement.
Craft a thesis-based literary essay supported by relevant and purposeful text evidence, reasoning and explanation
Write a reflective narrative that reveals their definition of the greater good with examples from the texts read and studied over the course of the year.
Sustain collaborative discussion on literature rich in meaning by building on others’ ideas and articulating their own clearly.