8th Grade Reading: Literature

For eighth graders, this Common Core area helps students gain mastery of the deeper tasks involved in reading a fictional text. No matter what they are reading, the standards require students to increase the complexity in the texts they read and deepen their understanding of the connections within and between texts. Among the complete standards for this grade, eighth graders will be asked to: support a textual analysis with direct textual evidence and explicit inferences, determine the theme of a text and how it develops within the text, be able to give an objective summary of a text, be able to analyze complex word and phrase choices in a text, including figurative and connotative meanings, as well as analogies and allusions to other texts, dramatic irony, suspense and humor, analyze how stories change when presented in audio, staged or filmed forms, and to understand the choices of actors and directors when adapting the work for a new medium, read text appropriate to grade level while increasing in the level of text complexity throughout the year.