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 lesson, students view archival photographs, combine their efforts to comb through a database of more than 2,000 archival newspaper accounts about race relations in the United States, and read newspaper articles written from different points of view about post-war riots in Chicago.

This online interactive lesson from the United Kingdom's National Archives guides students through several primary sources in this case study about the Allies at War - What the Public Did Not See to answer the big question, "How strong was the wartime friendship between Britain, the USA, and the USSR 1941-45?" There is a worksheet, glossary, and timeline provided to assist students in their analysis. You must click on the picture of each primary source to access it.

This online interactive lesson from the United Kingdom's National Archives guides students through several primary sources in this case study about the Allies at War - What the Public Saw to answer the big question, "How strong was the wartime friendship between Britain, the USA, and the USSR 1941-45?" There is a worksheet, glossary, and timeline provided to assist students in their analysis. You must click on the picture of each primary source to access it.

Few geo-political events have resonated through the past 70 years like Neville Chamberlain?s decision to pursue the policy of appeasement in reaction to German aggression leading up to the Second World War. Leaders throughout the world have invoked appeasement to justify military action ever since. The decisions that went into Chamberlain?s policy, however, were far from straightforward. Historians have continually debated and reinterpreted these events. In this lesson, students address the issue of appeasement and explore and weigh evidence against and in favor of the policy.

This primary source document is a translation of material provided to East German propagandists in August 1961, just after the Berlin Wall was built. Typical of the GDR"™s approach, it presents the Wall as a glorious triumph of socialism. It was produced by the Election Commission of the National Front of the GDR as material to use to get out the vote for the September 1961 election.

On March 1, 1896, a massive Ethiopian army routed Italian forces at the Battle of Adwa. The battle marked the largest military triumph of an African state over a European army in the 19th century and helped Ethiopia retain its independence during Europe's "scramble for Africa." In this lesson students read three different textbook accounts of the battle - two American and one Ethiopian - to investigate the question: How did Ethiopia defeat Italy at the Battle of Adwa?

The Battle of the Somme was a definitive campaign of the First World War. Unprecedented casualties resulted from intense trench warfare and new military technologies. In this lesson, students analyze and compare three different accounts of the battle?s first day -- one from a British journalist who paints a rosy picture of the Allied offensive and two from combatants that provide starkly different portraits of the event.

In this lesson students learn how Birth of a Nation reflected and influenced racial attitudes, and they analyze and evaluate the efforts of the NAACP to prohibit showing of the film.

Students will explore the Supreme Court case Board of Education v. Earls, in which high school sophomore Lindsay Earls challenged her school's drug testing policy. Students will watch a documentary on the case, apply the Fourth Amendment to the case, and further their understanding by participation in activities such as creating an anti-drug campaign and a moot court or mock trial.

In this lesson, students will confirm, negate, and build information about the nation’s changing demographic using an organizational chart; write a letter to respond to a viewpoint offered in the central text; and talk about their own multiple identities in relation to those around them.

This lesson plan attempts to dissolve the artificial boundary between domestic and international affairs in the postwar period to show students how we choose to discuss history.

These docmument based questions and essay prompt provide the student with an in-depth opportunity to evaluate the concepts behind capitalism and communism using primary sources. Selections are taken from: Friedrich Engels, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Adam Smith, Karl Marx and others.

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. 

The past is often neatly partitioned in time periods and eras with generalized names meant to characterize what life was like during that time. In this multi-day lesson, students question the validity of using ?Dark Ages? to describe Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. In the process, students examine a variety of primary and secondary sources highlighting different social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental facets of life in Europe during this period.

In this activity students analyze a timeline and official and unofficial documents that reveal the events of the Iran-Contra Affair. This activity also models the types of questions that can help students analyze foreign policy documents from other events. The activity instructions include suggestions for how to differentiate the activity for students with different reading levels.

This online interactive lesson from the United Kingdom's National Archives guides students through several primary sources to answer the big question, "Did Churchill Cause the Cold War?" There is a worksheet, glossary, and timeline provided to assist students in their analysis. You must click on the picture of each primary source to access it.

This online interactive lesson from the United Kingdom's National Archives guides students through several primary sources to answer the big question, "Did Stalin Cause the Cold War?" There is a worksheet, glossary, and timeline provided to assist students in their analysis. You must click on the picture of each primary source to access it.

This online interactive lesson from the United Kingdom's National Archives guides students through several primary sources to answer the big question, "Did Truman Cause the Cold War?" There is a worksheet, glossary, and timeline provided to assist students in their analysis. You must click on the picture of each primary source to access it.