Lightning literature & composition is a language arts course with a heavy emphasis on literature and writing.  It is written for students who are on grade level, in a way that encourages a lot of independent work.  The author's intent is to prepare students for high school composition, while exposing them to a variety of quality literature.

In each course, there are 36 weekly lessons grouped into chapters. There are twelve chapters in Grade 8; one for each of the major pieces of literature that are studied throughout the year plus some on short stories and one on poetry, but the chapters do not necessarily correspond to a specific time period. There is a consistent pattern in the chapter contents, however: Introduction (to the literary work), While You Read (what to look for), Vocabulary List, Comprehension Questions, Literary Lesson, Mini-Lesson (writing lesson), and Writing Exercises.

There are 8-12 exercises per chapter, in seven different coded types - L for literary lessons, M relating to mini-lessons, C practicing composition skills, T for thinking skill pages, G exercises that review grammar and mechanics, P for puzzles, and E for extra-challenge (the last two being the optional ones). There's a nice variety in these exercises and a well-thought-out relationship between the literary and composition activities. 

Parents will want to order a separate grammar curriculum, as it isn't covered in this series.  Learn more.

This book shifts students to a more challenging level of work, especially in the areas of writing and critical thinking. Similar in format to other books in the series, this course includes dictation, grammar, spelling, vocabulary, analogies, composition work, and four book studies.

In many of the lessons, passages from well-known literature are dictated to students. (If this is too challenging, have them copy passages first, then write them from dictation.) In addition, students work on spelling from a list of the most commonly misspelled words (found at the back of their book) coupled with their own list of troublesome words they encounter. Grammar activities and exercises in each lesson often tie in with the dictated passage. Frequent writing assignments develop composition skills, but a special five-week unit on writing teaches students to write four lengthier papers: a narrative essay, a persuasive essay, a comparison/contrast essay, and a research paper. Four book-study units are interspersed between other lessons. The four books students will read are Daddy Long Legs, A Lantern in Her Hand, Eric Liddell, and God’s Smuggler. The student activity book includes basic spelling, capitalization, and comma rules in the appendix, and students are expected to use these as reference tools.

Writing for Learning: Cursive Writing for seventh grade and above provides detailed cursive writing instruction. It's ideal for students with previous cursive instruction as well as those new to cursive. This workbook includes a thorough basic strokes review, elements of legibility, and individual letter practice with stroke descriptions_1 Detailed stroke descriptions_1 help students understand proper letter formation. Special pages on joining cursive letters remind students how to properly connect letters. 

Spelling Workout has all the components you need to lead students from simple sound-letter relationships to more complex spelling patterns.

Students learn spelling skills based on phonics through unique, cross-curricular reading passages, practice, and high-interest writing activities. Packed with flexible lessons, motivating activities, including fun riddles and puzzles, this dynamic program leads students to spelling success!

Notes: This is an effective, open-and-go Spelling curriculum.  The teacher's guide provides all answers, as well as the support you need.

Start by learning a list of prepositions? Unusual, yes, but effective. Then, by identifying and crossing out prepositional phrases, students can see the core of each sentence. Covering parts of speech, capitalization, punctuation, and sentence writing, concepts are presented in small, understandable increments, followed by plenty of practice. The overall approach is mastery, utilizing a system of sentence labeling rather than diagramming. Correcting/grading is easy, requiring a minimum of teacher time nd might be done by the student himself (with supervision). 

The Plus course includes expanded coverage of independent and dependent clauses.  Learn more.

Wordly Wise works. It's a vocabulary-building program that grows with the student, and makes vocabulary building interesting and entertaining. All editions of Wordly Wise share a similar format giving interesting word histories, dealing with usage issues, and exposing common usage pitfalls. There are 20 lessons in each level plus five review lessons. Typical lessons contain an alphabetized list of fifteen words with a brief entry for each including part of speech, concise definition, and proper usage of the word in the context of an interesting sentence that provides a mnemonic anchor for the word. Following are activity sections (which vary slightly with the edition). Crossword puzzles and Hidden Message puzzles are used for review. The overall word list for the series consists of 3000 words; their selection based on frequency, grade-level literature, textbooks, and SAT-prep books.