Norris School District, Curriculum

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TITLE

8th grade English

Text: Writer’s Choice Grammar and Composition Glencoe, 2005

Description: English 8 is a required course for all eighth grade students as part of the core curriculum block. The class meets every other day for 73 minutes. The curriculum includes the Writing Process (a variety of genre represented in the writing), the Six Traits of Writing, descriptive essay writing, historical fiction writing, and grammar.

The Writing Process slows the writing down into the key components—prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. Students will engage in a writer’s workshop and create choice pieces of writing, demonstrating the use of the process as they create samples of their writing.

The Six Traits of Writing focuses on enhancing a piece of writing through six key traits—ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. Students will improve their writing for all the traits, as well as focus on isolated traits through general assignments.

The descriptive essay focuses on using sensory detain to describe a person, place, or thing and is written formally for the state writing assessment.

This essay is assessed according to the Six Traits of Writing.

The historical fiction writing will be completed as part of a cross-curricular project focusing on the colonial time period. Students will learn how to write according to a stories plot line, which includes the enciting force, rising action, climax, turning point, and falling action. Students will also learn how to create believable detail in relation to characters, setting, and plot line. Creating dialogue—writing realistic dialogue, and punctuating dialogue properly—will be a focus.

Grammar will be taught using sentence diagramming, as well as mini-lessons throughout the year, as teachable moments arise. Students will learn the parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and verbals) and how they work together to create a properly written sentence. Students will also learn to identify and write various types of sentences (simple, compound, and complex).
Course Objectives: Course Objectives are aligned with the Nebraska State Standards.

Bench Marks
Writing Process—Students will demonstrate multiple examples of each stage of the writing process, by actually going through the process and showing completeness of each step.

Six Traits—Students will engage in discussion of each trait as well as looking at sample papers and discussing the score each paper would receive according to the Six Traits criteria. Students will also participate in activities related to each trait, and evaluate their own writing for each trait separately, putting it all together in a final paper in the end.

Students will engage in several practices of descriptive essay writing, as well as exposure to the format of the state writing test. The culmination of this unit will be the state wide writing assessment.

The historical fiction writing will be part of a integrated unit of the colonial time period. Students will create historically accurate characters, settings, and plot lines and use that for the basis of their short story.

Grammar will be taught mainly through mini lessons during the year and formally in a diagramming unit. Sentence structure, parts of speech, and sentence types will be implemented.