English Language Arts

About this course

Eighth grade is the last year before high school English, and it is built to hand off a student who can write an argument and judge a source. Grammar reviews the parts of speech quickly, then works through clauses, participial and infinitive phrases, gerunds, dangling modifiers, difficult subject-verb agreement cases, active and passive voice, and one topic most programs skip entirely: verb mood, including the subjunctive (if I were, it is necessary that he be, thy will be done). Punctuation goes past commas into the hierarchy of pauses created by semicolons, colons, dashes, parentheses, and ellipses. Writing is organized around the MEAL plan for paragraphs, main idea, evidence, analysis, link, with the analysis step singled out as the one students neglect, and then applied to the five-paragraph essay, compare-contrast, cause-effect, argumentative, expository, narrative, and descriptive pieces. The second-pass writing unit is about revision as a craft: economy, coherence across a long piece, authentic voice, and rethinking structure rather than just fixing errors.

Research is a real strength this year. Your student learns the CRAAP test for evaluating sources by currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose, with a candid reliability table that says plainly that a personal blog has no review process and that Wikipedia is for background only, never a citation. Along with it come Cornell notes and mind maps, research questions versus topics, MLA and APA basics, plagiarism prevention, report structure from abstract to references, honest presentation of data in charts and graphs, and oral presentation with visual aids. Literature covers character function, Freytag's pyramid, conflict types, diction and syntax as author's craft, imagery and symbolism, biblical allusion, sonnets, odes, ballads, free verse, drama, and nonfiction essays, memoirs, and speeches. The unit closes with a lesson on evaluating literature from a Christian worldview, which is written thoughtfully rather than defensively: it gives five questions to ask of any book and argues that a Christian reader can engage a contrary worldview without endorsing it.

The course is 180 lessons across 15 units, twelve per unit, one per school day, at about 50 minutes each. It is arranged in two passes over eight strands, with units 1 through 8 laying the foundation and units 9 through 15 returning to the same ground at a higher level, so close reading, deep revision, advanced punctuation, and long-project research management sit in the second half. A typical lesson is 300 to 400 words of direct instruction with headed sections, labeled examples, and often a table, plus a practice task such as writing two MEAL paragraphs or applying the CRAAP test to three real sources, and it ends with a ten-question quiz that grades itself. Coming in, your student should be writing organized essays with a thesis and reading full-length books independently. The writing and research practice tasks produce work that needs a reader, so plan on reviewing those yourself even though the daily lessons are written for independent study.

What the course covers

• Greek and Latin roots, morpheme analysis, and academic vocabulary
• Close reading, annotation, and reading rate with comprehension
• Argument analysis, author credibility, and primary versus secondary sources
• Clauses, verbal phrases, modifiers, voice, and verb mood
• Advanced punctuation and the hierarchy of pauses
• The MEAL paragraph and six essay types
• Deep revision, coherence, voice, and register
• Freytag's pyramid, author's craft, imagery, symbolism, and poetic forms
• The CRAAP source test, MLA and APA citation, and research reports
• Evaluating literature from a Christian worldview

What your student will be able to do

• Use the subjunctive mood correctly and fix dangling modifiers
• Build a paragraph that states a claim, proves it, and explains the proof
• Evaluate a source for currency, authority, accuracy, and purpose
• Take structured research notes and cite in MLA or APA format
• Analyze an author's diction, syntax, tone, and use of symbol
• Ask worldview questions of a book and give a reasoned assessment of it

Scope and sequence

All 15 units of English Language Arts for Grade 8, in the order they are taught.

Every lesson, by title

All 180 lesson titles are listed here — nothing is withheld until you download. Open a unit to read its contents.

One whole lesson, exactly as it comes

This is a real lesson taken from the middle of the course — the teaching text, the practice, the homework, and the first three quiz questions with their answers. It is not a marketing excerpt.

What you will need

Drawn from the materials named across all 180 lessons of this course. Most families already own most of it.