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 resource from the New York Times has students explore the play Antigone and a Spanish flamenco dance company's adaptation of the play. The lesson includes activities, graphic organizers and writing assignments.

What drives changes to classic myths and fables? In this lesson students evaluate the changes Disney made to the myth of "Hercules" in order to achieve their audience and purpose.

In this lesson, students engage in a close reading of Hopper's painting and an Edward Hirsch poem to explore the types of emotion generated by each work in the viewer or reader, and how the painter and poet each achieved these responses.

In this lesson the students will be using a variety of skills to analyze fiction and expository texts. This combines the reading of detective fiction with written expository analysis in the form of a Detective’s Handbook. Each student reads a detective mystery, and the class watches and analyzes Murder She Purred to establish a collective example.

This lesson introduces an important theme in the novel, the Golden Rule. The Gallery Walk introduction of this theme incorporates a wide variety of worldviews, philosophies, and religions. Students also view a short segment of the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird.

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.

In this lesson, students will analyze the perspectives of a character—Scout—and the reader and the effect this creates for the reader. This lesson also features the last text to film comparison before the mid-unit assessment.

This assessment provides an opportunity for students to independently complete a text to film comparison.

In this lesson, students reread Act 1, Scene 2, in which Shakespeare introduces Bottom the weaver and Peter Quince gives out roles for the tradesmen’s production of Pyramus and Thisbe. The focus during the Work Time becomes the text to film comparison. Students view a short segment of the film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

In this lesson, students read lines 76–208 of Act 3, Scene 1, in which Puck comes upon the tradesmen rehearsing their version of Pyramus and Thisbe in the woods.

This assessment provides an opportunity for students to independently complete a text to film comparison. NOTE: Please read Teacher's Notes for film clip information.

This resource is a series of questions for students to answer after reading I, Robot by Isaac Asimov to provoke discussion of culturual and societal issues and how their effects in the book reflect in daily life.

This lesson will use the "infinite variety" of resources on the Internet to let students find their own image of Othello. The lesson will take them on a WebQuest, first to textual references, and then to on-line searches for images of Othello in film, play productions, and art. Then, students will write an essay about the casting of Othello to conclude the lesson.

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.

Listen-Read-Discuss (LRD) is a comprehension strategy that builds students' prior knowledge before they read a text. During the first stage, students listen as you present the content of their reading through a lecture, often paired with a graphic organizer. Next, students read the text and compare what they have learned during the lecture to their understanding of reading the text on their own. Finally, students discuss their understanding of the text with other students in their small/large group.

In this lesson students examine how imagery is used to represent ideas, themes, periods of history, and make cultural connections to poem, "Still I Rise." Students will reflect through written expression how resiliency is in their lives, school, and community.

The students will explore reading strategies using the think-aloud process as students investigate connections between the life and writings of Edgar Allan Poe. The unit, which begins with an in-depth exploration of “The Raven,” then moves students from a full-class reading of the poem to small-group readings of Poe’s short stories (“The Black Cat,” “Hop-Frog,” “Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”). The unit concludes with individual projects that explore the readings in more detail.

This lesson will be completed once students have read the script of the play The Monsters are Due on Maple Street and watched the film adaptation on The Twilight Zone. Students will complete a learning menu that includes an appetizer, entree, and dessert. All students will complete the same starter and main course but will then have a choice for their dessert.