Unit 1:Narrative Voices - Examining the Impact of Point of View and Dialogue
This unit engages students in an exploration of how perspectives and points of view influence beliefs within a community. During this unit, students read and analyze a variety of texts including short stories, poetry, and informational articles. Students will be encouraged to make connections between the narrative techniques employed by writers to create effects such as suspense or humor and what these techniques and texts reveal about society and community. The unit ends with students reimagining Poe's "The Tell Tale Heart" to create a different effect or convey a different theme.
Unit 2: Beyond Heroes and Holidays - Synthesizing Multimedia Sources
In this unit, students will examine the role that cultural identify plays in their community and as they progress through the stages of their lives. Students will employ various approaches to literary criticism and analyze several multimedia resource to synthesize information. At the end of the unit, students engage in a research task to recommend a new and creative way to celebrate cultural diversity in schools.
Unit 3:How It's Made - Analyzing Structure and Style
Students examine how common themes are conveyed using different storytelling structures. Unit texts include multiple literary texts from a variety of genres, including excerpts from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream to analyze how characters' decisions are provoked by dialogue or events and compare the effects of text structures and stylistic word choices. Students finish the unit by composing a literary analysis comparing stylistic and structural elements used to convey similar themes in two texts.
Unit 4: Speak Your Truth - Evaluating Arguments
In this unit, students will analyze the use of rhetoric by various writers and speakers and apply these analytical skills to a piece of original writing. Through the study of various speeches, poems, letters, and articles, students will identify elements of rhetoric used by writers and evaluate the effectiveness of the rhetoric. Students will compose an analysis of rhetoric in two commencement speeches and use these as mentor texts to compose their own "farewell" commencement speech as they complete their middle school experiences.
Click on the image above to see the Table of Contents for the Collections Grade 8 anthology.
Note: The BCPS ELA curriculum provides teachers and students with choices that allow for personalized, responsive, and engaging instruction. Students should read the majority of the unit's novel-length work(s) outside of class time. The suggested unit sequences and text options may vary.