Course Goals and Essential Questions

*Eighth Grade ELA Course Essential Questions:

1. What makes someone a skillful reader?
2. How does perspective shape or alter truth?
3. How do the study of fiction and nonfiction texts help me construct my understanding of reality?
4. How do collaboration and conversation deepen my textual comprehension, interpretation, and analysis?
5. What is my reading identity?
6. How can I use the words and structures I know to express the ideas that I have?
7. Why are task, purpose, and audience essential to my writerly life?
8. What strategies and tools can I use to set goals and build my independence as a writer?
9. How does collaboration and conversation deepen my written and spoken language's organization, development, and grammar?
10. How can I harness the power of written and spoken words to help me advocate for my beliefs and be a contributing participant in civic life?

*Eighth Grade ELA Course Goals and Objectives:

We succeed when each student is able to...

1. transfer literacy skills to a variety of new texts, across disciplines, and to new demands in and outside of school (V1, LP 1, 2)
2. effectively write for a variety of purposes including externally communicating to various audiences and critically reflecting and clarifying one’s own beliefs and thoughts (V2, LP 6)
3. be increasingly self-directed, skilled and persistent in reading text and communicating thoughts and ideas to others (V4, LP 5)
4. learn from mistakes and persevere in order to reflect, revise, and improve (LP 4, 9)
5. critically and carefully consume information from a variety of texts by considering the message of various authors, forms, and genres of text (V5)
6. collaborate, process, synthesize and problem-solve using oral and written communication (V6)
7. write and speak for social action (V7, LP 8)
8. use reading, writing, listening and speaking as avenues in seeking to develop an understanding of, empathy for, and appreciation of the views, values, cultures, and perspectives of others (V8)
9. interact with text and others to understand various interpretations that lead to deeper meaning and new learning (V9, LP 4)
10. become lifelong readers who seek out texts that are of personal interests as well as texts that will help them acquire answers to their own questions and solve unique problems (V10, LP8)

V= Vision Statement

LP= Learning Principle

*From Parkway School District's K-8 ELA Curriculum Map