Suggests ways of designing poetry writing assignments so that students are motivated to practice a particular writing skill. (RL)

Presents two standards-based language arts activities for middle school students. The first involves collecting family photographs, writing a descriptive essay based on each one, and publishing the final product using Microsoft Publisher. The second involves creating one-page autobiographies, designing a publishable product, and publishing it…

The Louisiana Department of Education produces two curriculum guides for use in teaching Louisiana Studies at the eighth grade level. Very little information on Louisiana architecture is included. The Division of Historic Preservation proposed and obtained funds for a cooperative project between themselves and the Department of Education that…

An intensive five-day all-day humanities course on 18th century thought and culture for eighth graders that involved 11 different departments is described. The course helped students recognize that what they were taught in one class could reinforce and illuminate what they were learning in another course. (RM)

Encourages the use of cooperative learning in an eighth grade classroom. Provides copies of four worksheets for classroom teaching. Suggests that cooperative learning groups help establish relationships and improve social skills. Describes group structure; how it maintains and assigns specific roles; and how it promotes independence and…

Describes a five-day instructional unit designed for seventh and eighth graders about the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Points out that the individual rights in the First Amendment often conflict with the rights of the majority. Provides student questions and suggestions for resources and activities. (CFR)

Presents a problem included on the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress in mathematics at grade eight in the content area of algebra and functions. Collects and examines a set of responses to this problem and discusses some examples of strategies that students used to determine the answer to the problem. (ASK)

Intended to increase reading motivation in students, this book features tales of ghosts and poltergeists. The tales range from the legendary to the contemporary. These accounts of ghost stories in the book provide subject matter for thoughtful interpretation and discussion, while challenging students in four critical reading categories: main idea,…

Suggestions for teaching writing to students in grades seven and eight range from student journals to spelling bingo and other writing games. (DD)

Investigated whether attitudes toward school mathematics on mathematical achievement differed between low and high intelligence eighth-grade students in three Japanese schools (N=808). Results indicate that the attitude of low intelligence students is more important and it affects more in magnitude than that of high intelligence students. (JN)

The "English Standards of Learning Enhanced Scope and Sequence" for grades 6-8 is a resource intended to help teachers align their classroom instruction with the content found in "English Standards of Learning for Virginia Public Schools," adopted by the Board of Education in November 2002. The Enhanced Scope and Sequence…

The importance of active student involvement is stressed in this discussion of a competency-based approach to career exploration. Five steps used in developing a one-semester, eighth-grade business exploration course are presented and described. Methods of teaching such a unit and advantages to this approach are discussed. (CT)

Investigates the effects of verbal fluency and curiosity in deductive or inductive treatment on tests dealing with various species interactions. Reports that neither psychomoter or written curiosity measures interacted significantly with any of the treatments and that eighth graders with good verbal ability did significantly better in the…

Presents examples of students' work to illustrate the typical approaches used at sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade levels and four common threads that are consistent with student development as observed in a Connected Mathematics Project class. (ASK)