US homeschool curriculum · 8th grade
8th Grade Language Arts
A self-paced online Language Arts course for 8th grade: 29 lessons across 7 units. A short placement quiz finds the right starting point, practice adapts as your child answers, and every lesson is marked automatically with progress reported to you.
- Every lesson has at least two different question styles, with hints and step-by-step worked solutions.
- Struggling triggers a gentler re-teach and a warm-up on the missing building block — never a visible drop in score.
- Work this course at its own level: a child can take 8th Grade Language Arts alongside a different grade in Math.
What your child learns
The scope and sequence below is generated from the live curriculum, so it is always what the app actually teaches.
Phonics and word reading
- Latinate and Anglo-Saxon register: Can choose the more formal, Latinate word over its plain Anglo-Saxon equivalent.
- Advanced loanword spellings: Can spell words such as queue, subtle, yacht and rendezvous.
- More Greek and Latin roots: Can use roots like bene-, mal-, omni- and poly- to work out a word's meaning.
- Advanced confusable words: Can choose correctly between flaunt/flout, adverse/averse and similar pairs.
Spelling
- Spell challenging advanced words: Can spell words such as conscientious, millennium and bureaucracy.
- -eous and -ious endings: Can spell words such as courageous, gorgeous and spontaneous.
- Silent letters in advanced vocabulary: Can spell words such as indict, corps and gauge.
- Assure, ensure and insure: Can choose correctly between assure, ensure and insure.
Grammar
- Passive voice for evasion: Can say how the passive voice can be used to avoid naming who is responsible.
- Hedging language: Can identify hedging language (perhaps, arguably, it could be said) used to soften a claim.
- Nested clauses: Can say how many dependent clauses are nested inside a long, complex sentence.
- Tracking reference across a text: Can say which noun a pronoun refers back to across several sentences.
- Verb mood: Can say whether a sentence is indicative (a statement), imperative (a command) or subjunctive (a wish or hypothesis).
Punctuation
- Scare quotes: Can say what putting a word in quotation marks signals when it isn't a quotation.
- Hyphenated compound modifiers: Can say whether a phrase like 'well known' needs a hyphen before the noun it describes.
- Editing a quotation: Can say what an ellipsis or square brackets are doing inside an edited quotation.
Vocabulary
- Satire and allegory: Can say whether an extract is using satire or allegory, and what it is really about.
- Bias in word choice: Can say how a word choice (protester/rioter) reveals a writer's bias.
- Semantic fields: Can say what theme a group of related words belongs to.
- Choosing a word for intensity: Can choose the word that best matches a described level of intensity (angry, livid, irritated).
Reading comprehension
- Analyzing unseen non-fiction: Can identify a writer's viewpoint and method in an unfamiliar non-fiction extract.
- Synthesizing two sources: Can combine information from two sources to answer a question neither answers alone.
- Historical and social context: Can explain why a line would have been understood differently when it was written.
- How a writer builds an effect: Can say how several techniques work together to build one overall effect across a text.
- Evaluating an argument: Can spot a weakness in an argument, such as an unfair generalization or an emotional appeal standing in for evidence.
Writing
- Discursive, balanced writing: Can choose the sentence that weighs up both sides fairly, rather than arguing one-sidedly.
- Formal debate language: Can choose the phrase that correctly opens or closes a formal debate speech.
- Structuring an extended response: Can choose the best overall structure for an extended piece of writing.
- Advanced proof-reading: Can spot the error in a long, complex sentence using semicolons, embedded quotations or the subjunctive.
Language Arts uses American spelling, punctuation and conventions throughout. It is not mapped to the Common Core ELA standards — the lesson list above is the honest description of what it teaches.