8th Grade
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” -Harper Lee
Course Description
Course Goals
Together we will be reading, analyzing, and discussing a wide variety of texts, and our analysis will be demonstrated through discussion, compositions, projects, and presentations. Students will examine the links among culture, history, and literature (remember that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it...). Ultimately, the work in this class will help strengthen your critical thinking and writing skills, as well as prepare you for the demands of high school and beyond. I also hope that you will strengthen your own personal voice and explore new creative paths.
Our objective is to be prepared in the areas of reading and writing (grammar and vocab, as well as structure) for high school. In order to accomplish this objective, we will:
- increase our academic vocabularies through word analysis, discovering meaning through context, and integrating new words into writing.
-write a variety of essays with a definitive claim and the best evidence to support and develop the thesis statement. Students will write with the mastery of grammar and mechanics expected of 8th or 9th graders.
-increase reading levels through the use of close reading strategies. Students should be reading assigned or independent books EVERY NIGHT.
Assigned Reading and Book Summaries
The 8th grade LA unit will be centered on an essential question that will consider things such as justice, stereotypes, voice, wisdom, and leadership. Themes in literature repeat, even across decades, so we will explore these connections and make a few of our own. Aside from numerous short stories, articles, poems, TED talks and videos, and independent reading books, we will also plan to read the following novels together as a class in 2025-26: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Born a Crime by Trevor Noah, Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher, Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kelly or Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. What we get to will be determined by how well we use our time; plans may change at my discretion.
WAAS has a copy of each text for the students to borrow, but I do encourage each student and their family to consider buying their own copy of the books. It is so much easier to be a strong, active reader when you are able to mark in the book. This tremendously aids in building reading comprehension skills. Additionally, students will read many of these books again in high school and college. Having your own copy is not mandatory, just suggested. Keep in mind, though, that if you use WAAS's copy, you must take care of it, or you will have to replace it.
These reading selections will ask us to take a good look at our culture (past and present) and at ourselves. I stand by my choice in selecting all of the novels, short stories, poems, and/or plays that we will read this year, but if you are honestly uncomfortable reading a text, please come to me immediately so that we can discuss it. I am including a brief summary of the texts listed above for families to have an understanding of what we will be gaining through reading and studying these texts. For further information about the texts, I suggest websites like Commonsensemedia.org or Goodreads.com. Should you have questions or reservations about any selections due to content, please contact me no later than September 15th. It is never my intention to have students read texts that cause them pain or conflict; however, I stand by each of my choices for the positive, powerful, and significant takeaways that come from reading and discussing these texts. Should a separate text need to be selected for your child, I need notice by 9/15/25 in order to best prepare.
Summaries are thanks to Goodreads.com and Amazon.com
To Kill A Mockingbird (classic)
An American classic, this novel focuses on the story of two siblings who are raised by their father. This father happens to be a lawyer who is brave enough to represent a black man in Mississippi in the 1930s. His actions have consequences for the whole family, forcing the reader to question their own obligations to truth, justice, fairness, and family.
Born A Crime (nonfiction)
Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. It is also the story of that young man’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life.
His stories weave together to form a moving and searingly funny portrait of a boy making his way through a damaged world in a dangerous time, armed only with a keen sense of humor and a mother’s unconventional, unconditional love.
Thirteen Reasons Why (contemporary YA)
Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers several cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker—his classmate and crush—who committed suicide two weeks earlier. Hannah's voice tells him that there are thirteen reasons why she decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, he'll find out why.
Clay spends the night crisscrossing his town with Hannah as his guide. He becomes a firsthand witness to Hannah's pain, and as he follows Hannah’s recorded words throughout his town, what he discovers changes his life forever.
Long Way Down ( novel in verse)
A cannon. A strap.
A piece. A biscuit.
A burner. A heater.
A chopper. A gat.
A hammer
A tool
for RULE
Or, you can call it a gun. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he’s after. Or does he?
As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buck’s in the elevator?
Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. Will doesn’t know her, but she knew him. Knew. When they were eight. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES.
And so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A story that might never know an END…if Will gets off that elevator.
Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds.
Pygmalion (satire/drama/play)
"Pygmalion is a play by George Bernard Shaw, named after a Greek mythological character. It was first presented on stage to the public in 1912. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence. In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. The general idea of that myth was a popular subject for Victorian era English playwrights, including one of Shaw's influences, W. S. Gilbert, who wrote a successful play based on the story called Pygmalion and Galatea first presented in 1871. Shaw also would have been familiar with the burlesque version, Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed. Shaw's play has been adapted numerous times, most notably as the musical My Fair Lady and the film of that name."
The Great Gatsby (classic)
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. This exemplary novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island during the obsession with excess, is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.
The Great Gatsby is one of the great classics of twentieth-century literature.
Long Term Assignments
Fahrenheit 451 (classic/dystopian)
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.
The classic novel of a post-literate future, Fahrenheit 451 stands alongside Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World as a prophetic account of Western civilization's enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity.
Bradbury's powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the potential of technology to create a classic of twentieth-century literature which over fifty years from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.
All American Boys (Contemporary YA)
"A 2016 Coretta Scott King Author Honor book, and recipient of the Walter Dean Myers Award for Outstanding Children’s Literature.
In this New York Times bestselling novel, two teens—one black, one white—grapple with the repercussions of a single violent act that leaves their school, their community, and, ultimately, the country bitterly divided by racial tension.
A bag of chips. That’s all sixteen-year-old Rashad is looking for at the corner bodega. What he finds instead is a fist-happy cop, Paul Galluzzo, who mistakes Rashad for a shoplifter, mistakes Rashad’s pleadings that he’s stolen nothing for belligerence, mistakes Rashad’s resistance to leave the bodega as resisting arrest, mistakes Rashad’s every flinch at every punch the cop throws as further resistance and refusal to STAY STILL as ordered. But how can you stay still when someone is pounding your face into the concrete pavement?
There were witnesses: Quinn Collins—a varsity basketball player and Rashad’s classmate who has been raised by Paul since his own father died in Afghanistan—and a video camera. Soon the beating is all over the news and Paul is getting threatened with accusations of prejudice and racial brutality. Quinn refuses to believe that the man who has basically been his savior could possibly be guilty. But then Rashad is absent. And absent again. And again. And the basketball team—half of whom are Rashad’s best friends—start to take sides. As does the school. And the town. Simmering tensions threaten to explode as Rashad and Quinn are forced to face decisions and consequences they had never considered before.
Written in tandem by two award-winning authors, this four-starred reviewed tour de force shares the alternating perspectives of Rashad and Quinn as the complications from that single violent moment, the type taken directly from today’s headlines, unfold and reverberate to highlight an unwelcome truth."
