This 8th grade unit highlights main events of the Civil Rights Movement and navigates to the life of Jackie Robinson and watching the movie 42.

This resource accompanies our Rethink 8th Grade ELA course. It includes ideas for use, ways to support exceptional children, ways to extend learning, digital resources and tools, tips for supporting English Language Learners and students with visual and hearing impairments. There are also ideas for offline learning. 

This parent guide supports parents in helping their child at home with the 8th grade ELA content.

In this activity, students will complete a close reading of the Gettysburg address by using the strategy called SOAPSTONE.

This lesson was designed to help students gain social studies/history content knowledge by using textual evidence to answer text-dependent questions.In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this history through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this lesson, students will use compare/contrast and question/answer text structures to analyze how nonfiction text is structured, identify transitions that support text structures, and cite evidence to support the identification of text structures.

In this three week unit, students will practice skills related to argumentative writing. They will ultimately write an argumentative/persuasive letter to the school board regarding school safety policy.

In this lesson, students will analyze written documents for position of writer and content. They will then synthesize a historical position based upon document analysis and connect historical struggles for equality with current movements.

This inquiry provides students with an opportunity to explore how words affect public opinion through an examination of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Students will investigate historical sources related to the novel and reactions of people in the North and South in order to address the compelling question "Can words lead to war?" The final summative assessment asks the to make an argument about the impact of the words in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

In this lesson, students examine India's caste system. Students then work in small groups to explore the economic, social, and political "rules" of the different classes in the Indian caste system.

This resource is a nonfiction, Common Core aligned reading passage with textual analysis questions about main idea, characterization, and supporting details.

In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this history through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

Students share opinions about the tone and content of two commercials presented during the Super Bowl.They then work with a partner to critique a commercial from a past Super Bowl, and then assess the commercials that run during a half-hour television show.

This lesson aligns with the 7th grade Social Studies curriculum and works best when integrated into an interdisciplinary unit, such as Reliving the Middle Ages Across Lliterary Genres. Interdisciplinary Units are effective when teachers from two different content areas collaborate to plan lessons, assessments, activities and projects that support their content skills and standards. The content being taught in one course supports the content in another and students approach difficult, content-specific texts with more familiarity and gain better comprehension.  Students read two nonfiction articles about the Middle Ages, which lasted from about A.D. 500 to A.D. 1500. Both texts examine one of the most significant events of this time period-- the spread of the bubonic plague, or the Black Death. Each text is organized into cause-and-effect pattern of organization. One outlines HOW the disease spread (causes) and the other explains how it affected Europe (effects). Students analyze two texts by different authors writing about the same topic, the Black Plague, and compare/contrast how each author shapes their presentations of key information by emphasizing different evidence. 

Students read two descriptions of Earth's interior structure and summarize similarities and differences between the two and answer a series on analysis questions.

This lesson was designed to help students gain social studies/history content knowledge by using textual evidence to answer text-dependent questions.

This lesson and resource uses point-by-point arguments to help students develop higher order thinking skills by learning to distinguish fact from opinion.

In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.