8th Grade

Curriculum

An Overview

Students will learn to describe and connect the essential ideas, arguments, and perspectives of texts by using their knowledge of text structure, organization, and purpose in Literature from Pre-Colonial to Industrial America.

Students will read 5 Classic Novels together in class and 4 novels outside of class. The independent novels are chosen by the students but are linked by a commonality - theme, genre, or period of history.

We will be exploring text that coincides with our units in Social Studies including America before and after colonization, The Revolution and Forming a New Nation, The Civil War, Migration and Industry, and a Changing Nation. Titles may vary from year to year but each novel is notable, award-winning, and withstood the test of time. They stand up to the test of time and in doing so become a Socratic Exploration, the premise of each activity being:

If you are answering questions - that is an assignment

If you are questioning answers - that is literature.

Literature is a deep dive - asking questions that do not have simple answers. The canned response of searching for "the right answer" or what the teacher thinks is not authentic learning.

Writing: All essays are written in Google Docs and submitted on the appropriate classroom page unless otherwise noted by Mrs. Mancini

Essays must include an MCS formal 5-part heading

Acceptable format is double-spaced, 12pt font, and Arial, Georgia, or Times New Roman Font.
Submission should be in black ink via Google Docs or blue or black pen.

Speaking/Listening: Students will have multiple opportunities to deliver information as a team as well as independently. Active participation in Socratic Seminar, drawing inferences, and making logical correlations will be integrated into all oral presentations. We will focus our active class participation using shared inquiry as we read with care and perception, and take part intelligently in discussion of literature.

Shared InQuiry Method and Authentic Response:

Reading Classic Literature requires a working knowledge of universally understood literary terms: character, plot, foreshadowing, conflict, denouement, hubris, protagonist, theme, climax, tragic flaw, mood, tone, and a classic vocabulary using our Latin and Greek roots. These are the tools of the trade but there is so much more. Each novel is unique and we must respond to it individually with an authentic response because the deepest scholarship is the most human scholarship.

The REaders Non-Taxonomy

Literature is not simply terms and devices - it is a social/emotional experience. It is a balance of process and content.

In order to address this balance we are using a list of thinking/feeling skills created by Michael Clay Thompson who was influenced by Barbara Clark's research on developing student potential and then synthesized with Bloom's Taxonomy of human cognition:

Memory: Recall

Cognition: Comprehension

Reason: Avoiding logical errors

Synthesis: Combining or connecting ideas

Divergence: Thinking of alternatives

Convergence: Choosing one idea

Evaluation: Deciding value by criteria

Ethics: Deciding moral value

Analysis: Studying components

Application: Using ideas

Intuition: Ideas from the blue

Imagination: Seeing mental images

Emotion: Feelings

Aesthetics: Artistic/sensory feelings

Dissassumption: Escaping false assumptions

Teaching students to use these cognitive processes we are able to dive deeper into literature and students become stronger critical thinkers.

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