Grade 8 English Language Arts: how to help at home
What your child learns in Grade 8 english language arts in the New Brunswick Curriculum, and simple things to try at home.
The Big Ideas this year
- Interactions: Expression. Describe and communicate thoughts, feelings, and experiences as well as personal strengths.
- Interactions: Exchanges. Seek and respond to questions to clarify or explain ideas, concepts, problems, and solutions.
- Interactions: Reception. Critically reflect on the contributions of others to extend understanding.
- Reading: Word Study. Explain how a variety of word structures can be used to solve unfamiliar words.
- Reading: Fluency. Begin to read less familiar text with accuracy and expression, both silently and aloud.
- Reading: Vocabulary. Begin to use a range of strategies to determine new vocabulary in all texts.
- Reading: Reading Comprehension. Construct meaning from a variety of text considering the source, intended audience, and purpose.
- Reading: Text Analysis and Criticality. Independently select, read, and examine critically a variety of texts representing all voices.
- Representing: Process. Develop strategies to enhance clarity in multi-modal works.
- Representing: Craft. Create a variety of texts with purpose and understand the influence of the writer/creator, including authorship in digital contexts.
Easy ways to practise english language arts at home
- Read what they are interested in: graphic novels, sports pages, series. Then talk about it.
- Ask for the main idea and one piece of evidence from the text.
- Have them write real messages: a thank-you note, a short review, a note to a relative.
- Read their writing aloud to them; they often spot their own mistakes by ear.
What each unit covers
Word Study
Using prefixes, suffixes and Greek and Latin roots to work out unfamiliar words, reading context clues, and noticing how word choice changes feeling.
Reading Detective
Making and checking predictions, choosing a strategy when reading gets tricky, drawing local and global inferences from clues, and summarizing the main ideas of complex texts.
Forms, Patterns & Visuals
Comparing text forms such as editorials, news articles, poems and graphic novels, spotting text patterns like problem-solution and compare-contrast, and judging how features, images and design add to meaning.
Close Reading
Reading original short passages and answering questions about theme, tone, word choice, inference and the author's purpose, using evidence from the text.
Whose Story Is It?
Recognizing third-person limited and omniscient narrators, spotting clues that a narrator is unreliable, and thinking about how a story would change from another character's point of view.
Literary Devices
Naming devices like simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, irony, foreshadowing and symbolism in short excerpts, and identifying a narrator's point of view.
Argument & Media
Telling fact from opinion, spotting persuasive appeals (ethos, pathos, logos) and weak reasoning, and judging how reliable a source or media message is.
Digital Citizens
Staying safe and respectful online, protecting privacy, spotting misinformation and disinformation, understanding how feeds are curated, and thinking about audience and purpose in digital and media texts.
Write It Better
Choosing the right form and tone for an audience, using reliable sources and giving credit, building voice, acknowledging other perspectives, and revising, editing and proofreading drafts.
Grammar & Style
Active and passive voice, run-ons, parallel structure, commas, apostrophes, semicolons, colons and common usage choices.
What the report card levels look like at home
- Working below
- Just getting started with this idea. Short, regular practice with lots of support helps most.
- Approaching
- Understands parts of it and is building confidence. Keep practising the tricky parts.
- Meeting
- Has it! Mixed review now and then keeps it strong.
- Excelling
- Applies it confidently, even in new or harder situations. Try challenge mode and real-life problems.
Your child’s teacher decides the level on the report card. Read the New Brunswick report card guide.
Common questions
Read what they are interested in: graphic novels, sports pages, series. Then talk about it. Ask for the main idea and one piece of evidence from the text. Keep sessions short, about 10 to 15 minutes, and stop on a success.
The New Brunswick Curriculum Grade 8 english language arts units include word study, reading detective, forms, patterns & visuals, close reading, whose story is it?, literary devices.
Free printable Grade 8 english language arts practice sheet
Questions from every unit, with an answer key.