Answer:
The Grade 8 Core ELA Units take students through literary and nonfiction texts that explore
how individuals are affected by their choices, their relationships, and the world around them.
In Unit 1, Everyone Loves a Mystery, students will try to determine what attracts us to stories
of suspense. Unit 2, Past and Present, asks the Essential Question: What makes you, you?
Unit 3, No Risk, No Reward, asks students to consider why we take chances, while Unit 4,
Hear Me Out, asks students to consider the unit’s driving question—How do you choose the
right words?—by providing a range of texts that allow students to consider how a person’s
words can affect an audience. Next, Unit 5’s Trying Times asks students to think about who
they are in a crisis. Finally, students finish up the year with an examination of science fiction
and fantasy texts as they think about the question “What do other worlds teach us about our
own?” in Unit 6, Beyond Reality.
INTRODUCTION | GRADE 8
3 ELA Grade Level Overview | GRADE 8
Text Complexity
ELA Grade Level Overview
Grade 8
4 ELA Grade Level Overview | GRADE 8
UNIT 1: EVERYONE LOVES A MYSTERY
Unit Title: Everyone Loves a Mystery
Essential Question: What attracts us to the mysterious?
Genre Focus: Fiction
Overview
Hairs rising on the back of your neck? Lips curling up into a wince? Palms a little sweaty? These are tell-tale signs
that you are in the grips of suspense.
But what attracts us to mystery and suspense? We may have wondered what keeps us from closing the book or
changing the channel when confronted with something scary, or compels us to experience in stories the very things
we spend our lives trying to avoid. Why do we do it?
Those are the questions your students will explore in this Grade 8 unit.
Edgar Allan Poe. Shirley Jackson. Neil Gaiman. Masters of suspense stories are at work in this unit, with its focus on
fiction. And there’s more: Alfred Hitchcock, the “master of suspense” at the movies, shares tricks of the trade in a
personal essay, and students also have the chance to read about real-life suspense in an account by famed reporter
Nellie Bly. After reading classic thrillers and surprising mysteries within and across genres, your students will try
their own hands at crafting fiction, applying what they have learned about suspense to their own narrative writing
projects. Students will begin this unit as readers, brought to the edge of their seats by hair-raising tales, and they
will finish as writers, leading you and their peers through hair-raising stories of their own.
Text Complexity
In Grade 8 Unit 1 students continue their development as critical thinkers at an appropriate grade level. Though this
unit focuses on the genre of fiction, it features both poetry and informational texts. With a Lexile range of 590-1090,
most texts in this unit are between 940L and 1010L, an accessible starting point for eighth graders. Additionally, the
vocabulary, sentence structures, text features, content, and relationships among ideas make these texts accessible
to eighth graders, enabling them to grow as readers by interacting with such appropriately challenging texts.
Explanation:
