Grade 8 (Lisa)

Our climate fiction unit has allowed eighth-graders to practice taking on more challenging texts, which tends to force students to slow down and move beyond reading “just” for plot points and to make a conscious effort to notice “signposts” in their texts: flashbacks, moments of contradiction, repeated motifs/words/themes, characters’ “a-ha!” moments or the big questions they ask themselves, “words of the wiser,” etc. Looking for these specific moments requires students to pause, ask deeper questions of the text, and derive more meaning from their reading.

For the text themselves, students had their choice of three options: The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, a novel from the trilogy Three Californias by Kim Stanley Robinson, or The Words in my Hands by an Australian writer/artist/activist who uses the pen name Asphyxia. My goal with these texts was not to wallow in doom and despair, but to engage student imaginations toward a future that involves collective action and care, no matter what comes to pass. In addition to reading and discussing texts in a book club setting, students also practiced reading and annotating non-fiction articles, writing letters to the editor, and presenting information quickly and concisely in the form of “lightning talks” on various climate-related issues and solutions/mitigation strategies. Ask your student about which climate crisis-related issue they chose to speak about last week and what they learned from their research.

Eighth graders’ final project in Language Arts will be graduation speeches. Although speaking at graduation is optional, every student writes a speech and will share at least part of their composition with their peers during our last days of class. It is a wonderful opportunity for our young people to look back on their three years at Explorer West and reflect on how they’ve grown and on the events and people that have made their time here special.