8th Grade Material

September 4, 2010
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Eight days in, and I’m still scrambling a little with having an 8th grade prep. The last time I had 8th grade was 7 years ago, and I was scrambling a bit then (the last round of 8th grade had been 11 years before that), plus I got a student teacher for the last third of the year and I didn’t have to worry about it. So needless to say, I have been rifling through the files (both virtual and paper stylie), trying to figure out a direction through the 8th grade standards.

(I know; it’s a little funny to be posting 8th grade lessons on a site called SeventhGradeEnglish…)

I have more on this soon, but right now I ‘d like to direct you over to SeventhGradeEnglish.com for a lesson I fished out of the paper archive, and revamped (just) a bit. It’s a poetry thang. I mean writing poetry. Sort of.

The 8th grade standards include more poetry kind of shtuff so…

It starts with that Robert Frost classic, “The Road Not Taken.”

It’s called “Prose into Poetry.“

3 Responses to 8th Grade Material

  1. joan b on September 5, 2010 at 8:34 am

    8th grade, huh? Mine are all 8th graders…I’ve followed your escapades with The Outsiders for the past few years. This year, we started with The Hunger Games; talk about getting kids to love reading!! My brainiacs are reading independently and can’t seem to stop. I’m reading this novel to the HP’s, even though their own class novel is different. This is the best part of their day.

  2. mrC on September 5, 2010 at 6:19 pm

    The kids keep telling me that I gotta read that series. Isn’t it pretty violent? Do you ever have parent “issues”? Thanks for following along. What are your class novels for eighth grade? This year I’m going with Nothing But The Truth, The Pearl, Call of the Wild, The Pigman, Maus, probably the Anne Frank play. They want me to do Walk Two Moons as well. I guess I’ll have to read it.

  3. Jen on September 25, 2010 at 10:05 pm

    Walk Two Moons is good. In some states it’s part of the 5th grade curriculum and others in 7th/8th. I had my 7th graders read it 4 yrs ago. I had at least one crier in every class at the end of the book. I started the novel off by giving each student a fortune cookie and the assignment to write a short story based on the fortune they received. They were fantastic!

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Mr. Coward has been teaching on the beautiful central coast of California since 1989.

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