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.

This teacher's guide for Addie on the Inside by James Howe contains discussion questions, activities, and research 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.

The purpose of this project is two-fold: first, to encourage students to make the reading of poetry a creative act; and, second, to help students appreciate particular literary devices in their functions as semaphores or interpretive signals. Those devices that are about the imagery of a poem (metaphor, simile, personification, description) can be thought of as magnifying glasses: we see most clearly that upon which the poet focuses our gaze. Similarly, those poetic devices that are about the sound of the poem (alliteration, consonance, enjambment, onomatopoeia, and repetition) can be thought of as volume buttons or amplifiers: we hear most clearly what the poet makes us listen to most attentively.

In this lesson, students compare and contrast two versions of the same fairy tale. Students use a Venn diagram to graphically illustrate the similarities and differences in the two stories.

This teacher's guide for The Dark Side of Nowhere by Neal Shusterman contains a summary of the text, discussion questions, activities, and research assignments.

A guideline for teachers to compare the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce and discuss how their narration choices affect the piece and the reader.

This lesson helps students explore the elements of poetry and their effect on meaning, tone, and style. Students also analye various forms of poetry both in pairs and independently and create their own poems and presentation slide show to show how to analyze poetic elements within their writing.

In this lesson, students are introduced to the genre of folktales and engage in a study of several Russian folktales. They are asked to read the tales aloud, and then to fill in a chart about each one. Next, they analyze the charts, answering questions about the folktales’ setting, main characters, and "uniquely Russian" attributes. They also compare and contrast Russian folktales with folktales they may have heard as young children. The lesson culminates with a writing assignment in which students will analyze the folktales or create their own.

Students work together in small groups to read, discuss, and analyze fairy tales. After compiling a list of common elements, students collaborate on their own original fairy tales—based on events from their own lives or the lives of someone they know. Each student decides what kind of experience to write about, composes and revises a fairy tale, and then presents their story to the rest of the class.

In the opening of this lesson, students focus on Chapter 6, even though they read both Chapters 6 and 7 for homework. This is intentional, since Chapter 6 is more integral to the work of the module, and since during Work Time, students will compare Chapter 6 with the poem “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden. Poem text structure analysis is introduced in this lesson.

In this lesson, students will practice the comparing and contrasting that they have learned in this unit: comparing and contrasting text structures, as well as comparing and contrasting the text and film versions of To Kill a Mockingbird.

During today’s assessment, students independently analyze how the Harper Lee uses allusions, perspective, and text structure to convey meaning in a piece of literature.

The Mid-Unit 2 Assessment Part 2 is broken down into three parts: The first part (a) requires students to analyze an author’s word choice. The second part (b) requires students to explain how Shakespeare uses a classic myth in his play and how he renders it new, and the third part (c) requires students to analyze the structure of two texts and explain how they contribute to the meaning of each.

In this lesson students compare the structure of the narrative as mapped out on the “Pyramus and Thisbe” Narrative Structure note-catcher from the previous lesson. Students reread Act 5, Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in parts, and as a whole group compare the similarities and differences in structure; whole group thinking is captured on an anchor chart.

The Mid-Unit 2 Assessment has two parts, taking two lessons to complete. In Part 1, students read a new myth and plot the narrative structure on the same Narrative Structure note-catcher used in Lesson 6 of this unit.

This resource includes two poems, eleven text-dependent questions (including one optional constructed-response prompt for students), and explanatory information for teachers regarding alignment to the CCSS.

This PDF allows students to read passages, identify the text structure, and write information from the passage into the appropriate graphic organizer. The handout will serve as a great means of practice to remediate, enrich, or extended students? knowledge about various types of text structures found in informational text.

Students will explore images from the Klondike and read White Fang closely to learn how to define and differentiate these terms, ultimately presenting their findings as nature and culture detectives.