Welcome to 8th Grade
In their last year of middle school, 8th graders immerse themselves in preparation for high school by practicing and strengthening skills they learned in earlier years of middle school while also learning new (and often more complex) skills. In many ways, 8th grade is a year of transition, as students are expected to have mastered the ways of middle school and begin becoming “high-schoolers.” Specifically, 8thgraders are expected to be independent thinkers and workers analyzing and explaining what they learn in both their writing and orally. 8th grade is also a time of celebration and excitement for many students as they anticipate high school.
By the time you leave 8th grade, you should have mastered the following skills:

​Nonfiction Reading
  •  Use text features like headings, table of contents, graphics, and captions to get set up for what a text will be about.  
  •  Pull out and paraphrase specific facts from a text.
  •  Identify, define, and use key vocabulary connected to the topic of the text.
  •  Identify idea structures across sentences and paragraphs: sequence, compare/contrast, cause and effect, main idea and examples, part-whole.
  •  Infer the main idea of a text or a section or paragraph of text.  When all of the facts are together, what do they say?  The author is teaching me that…
  •  Identify supporting details for a main idea.
  •  Explain how graphic text features work together with text to convey information.