What books will your 8th grader be reading in the fall?

[Kfamily]

I love getting new ideas for books by reading these lists. Please share what books your 8th grader will be reading next year. I would love to see them all...literature, independent reading, history biographies, science biographies, poetry, etc. Also, if you study only some books and just read others would you please share which ones you study and with what guide/method you will use to study it? Thanks so much for sharing!

[Kfamily]

Anyone with rising 8th graders? Or are 8th graders already?

Edited April 1, 2010 by Kfamily

[Oakblossoms]

Mine is. I'm not to making a reading list yet. I think I have the rest of my plans though. So, I'll subscribe.

 

We are doing SOTW 4. So, most of his reading will go along with that.

 

I don't have the Activity Guide yet. That is where I usually find most of my book suggestions.

[mom2denj]

My 8th grade dd next year will be reading all of the Sonlight Core 6 books. It is a great reading list! You could always go over to the Sonlight site and take a look at the lists they have got. :D

[choirfarm]

I'm still working on it for next year. We will be doing TOG year 4 and he will be doing a lot of the rhetoric reading because he asked to and loves it and has read quite a few of the books on the dialectic list. Here is the tentative list:

 

All Quiet on the Western Front

Animal Farm

Pearl

Metamorphasis

Lord of the Flies

Chosen

Great Gatsby

Our Town

The Crucible

To Kill a Mockingbird

A Seperate Peace

Hobbit

Cry Beloved Country??

 

For church history he will be reading The Hiding Place, Screwtape letters as well as biographies of Detrich Bonhoeffer, Ghandi, Brother Andrew, Eric Liddel, Mother Teresa and several others I can't think of.

 

Christine

[Kfamily]

Thanks all!

 

I'd love to see more ideas.

 

We'll be choosing mostly works to support our history study of the Renaissance and Reformation but I still love to see what others choose for other time periods. I usually keep those in mind for when we get to that time period.

Choirfarm, I like the selections from TOG Year 4. I would love to use TOG or at least really get a long look at it, but it is out of our price range. I did try for that free giveaway of TOG posted yesterday, but sadly I don't think I won.

 

More ideas are always appreciated...

[Stacy in NJ]

Since we'll be working our way through the Middle Ages for our history rotation, my 8th grader will read several of the books listed in the Logic stage/Middle Ages section of the WTM (pages 349-350 2nd edition) which also corresponds nicely with the reading list from History Odyssey.

 

Additionally, He'll complete The Lord of the Rings for our lit study via LL from LOTR.

 

One Thousand and One Arabian Nights (McCaughrean)

The Door in the Wall (de Angeli)

Tales from Shakespeare (Lamb)

Beowulf (Nye)

The Story of King Arthur and his Knights (Pyle)

The Adventures of Robin Hood (Green)

Adam of the Road (Gray)

The Canterbury Tales (McCaughrean)

Tales from Japan (McAlpine)

The Trumpeter of Krakow (Kelly)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knights (trans. JRR Tolkien)

[Ester Maria]

I'll have one 8th grader next year. While the list is still not definite and complete, I'm considering doing something along the lines of the following for her English readings:

 

Jewish readings

Sholem Aleichem - Adventures of Mottel: The Cantor's Son E/H, entire work

Sholem Aleichem - Jewish Children E, possibly not the entire work

David Grossman - Lion's Honey: The Myth of Samson H, maybe E/H

Israel Joshua Singer - The Brothers Ashkenazi E

- some of the Yiddish theatre dramas, still not sure which, E

(E means that she's reading an English translation, H means that she's reading a Hebrew translation or original)

 

Other literature for English

William Shakespeare - Antony and Cleopatra

John Milton - Samson Agonistes

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (on her request, she basically read it already, but she wants to actually study it)

Bertolt Brecht - Mother Courage and Her Children

T. S. Eliot - The Waste Land (I'm NOT sure if she's ready for that poem, but I'm willing to try by the end of the year)

Lord Byron - Childe Harold (not sure if in entirety, I'd love to, but this is not a priority work this year)

Charles Dickens - Hard Times

Henry James - Daisy Miller because it's short and practical and we haven't read it yet, and possibly one more of the lengthier works (I'm thinking about The Portrait of a Lady)

+ maybe we'll study in synchrony The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) and The Jew of Malta (Marlowe), but still not sure about that; and I'd love to do Marlowe's Dido with her

 

What I'm missing is a good few novels to squeeze in to keep her reading good literature in English, but she's doing the majority of literary studies in Italian anyway, so with a few more books, this should be it.

Regarding poetry in English, I'd like to do Lake Poets and then a unit on Victorian poetry with her. That's a general plan for now, no concrete poems specified yet.

 

Regarding non-literary works I'll have her read in English, so far I'm only sure about the Jewish philosophy we started this year (lots of Rambam, HaLevi's Kuzari, possibly some more Philo of Alexandria, but basically we'll focus on Rambam), and we'll probably do Mill's On liberty but the rest of the philosophy she'll get in Italian.

That's the general plan so far.

[Mom22ns]

My 8th grader will be doing Core 6 http://www.sonlight.com/6C5.html too. In addition, he'll also be doing LL8 http://www.hewitthomeschooling.com/book/bgroup.asp?i=8093

 

Between the two, I think its a pretty good reading list. He will read a lot on his own too. His personal reading is mostly fantasy, some good, some twaddle:001_smile:.

[Kfamily]

Ester Maria,

Do you arrange your literature choices to follow your history time period or do you arrange them following a different plan? I vaguely remember reading something about this. So far I follow our history time period somewhat, but I usually end up with a more eclectic list than that.

 

Here are the ideas I have so far:

 

The Hobbit

Autobiography of Ben Franklin

Julius Ceasar

Merchant of Venice ...these are books needed for Classical Writing

 

From Ambleside Online Year 8

History of English Literature for Boys and Girls

Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves

Shakespeare's Sonnets

Everyman

Milton's shorter poems

Francis Bacon Essays

Utopia

Swift's "A Modest Proposal"

Age of Fable

biographies on Galileo and Newton

I, Juan de Pareja (historical fiction on Velazquez and this will be our artist study of the year too)

Edited April 1, 2010 by Kfamily

[mcconnellboys]

Here are some of the literary selections my older son read when he was in eighth grade. He also read some histories, biographies, and historical fiction works that year, but I have those included on his history list.

 

The Man Without a Country, Edward Hale

 

Little Women, Alcott and others of her series, Little Men, etc.

RRC has “Novel Units Lit Guide available for this title

 

Sherlock Holmes stories and Hound of the Baskervilles, Doyle

Class Act Press Study Guide

 

The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling

 

War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells (anniversary ed. of original audio available)

Novel Unit Lit Guide available

 

The Call of the Wild, London

Novel Unit Lit Guide available

 

O. Henry stories

 

Murder on the Orient Express, Christie

Class Act Press Movie Guide available

 

The Yearling, Rawlings

Novel Unit Lit Guide available from their online store

 

The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde

Sparknotes, online

 

Pygmalion, Shaw

Novel Unit Lit Guide available

 

Little House books, Wilder

Novel Unit Lit Guide available

 

The Good Earth, Buck

Novel Unit Lit Guide available

 

The Martian Chronicles, Isaac Asimov

The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov

The Complete Robot, Asimov

 

Father Brown mysteries, Chesterson

 

Poetry:

 

Carl Sandburg poetry

2 poems on eNotes

 

Robert Frost poetry

Guide on Sparknotes

 

e. e. cummings poetry

2 on eNotes

 

Walter de la Mare poetry

 

The Dream Keeper and other Poems, Langston Hughes

Several on eNotes

[Ester Maria]

Ester Maria,

Do you arrange your literature choices to follow your history time period or do you arrange them following a different plan? I vaguely remember reading something about this. So far I follow our history time period somewhat, but I usually end up with a more eclectic list than that.

When the kids are small, no, I study literature in synchrony and disregard the context, I think that's how it should be done until late middle school or high school. I'm starting to do literature along with History (+ Art and Music) in a diachronic fashion next year, but I've decided to do it via Italian, not via English, so our set of readings for English is based more on the criteria of "random classics of (anglophone mostly) literature I think she should go through" rather than on the historical context.

 

For my younger one, nothing is contextual yet, both sets of her readings are "mixed" and she begins her diachronic study the year after her sister (I know, I'm crazy for not combining them, but I can't get them working together in peace, so I'm doing everything separately with each of them, and they study completely different works :lol:).

 

Regarding the Ancients round I plan to do with the older one in Italian, I guess it's too predictable to even post it - most of it she's got to know in some form before though. I'm also making overlapping with her classics readings, as she's on the level of rather fluent reading in Latin at least, so I'll combine part of the readings there too. Basically we're a bit chaotic, there are some 5ish lists in question actually, but with lots of overlapping. :)

The big project of the year will be covering both Greek cycles (and I'm doing Ancient Greek periodization with her in Greek next year), emphasis on drama, and regarding Roman readings, I'll probably shift most of that to the Latin list. She expressed a desire to study in depth Ovid's Metamorphoses and Epistulae, I can't not agree with that, so I suppose the list will go more in that direction, and Ovid in general, even though I originally planned to do the whole Aeneid, now I'm thinking of cutting lots of it out and study fewer parts, but thoroughly, and leave the rest for the year after. In any case it's still not a definite list, but it will be Ancients for Italian. And Manzoni, but that's her school requirements (a few other stuff too).

[KarenC]

Here's our tentative list for next year.

 

My Father’s Daughter

The Wave

Alas, Babylon

The Book Thief

Red Scarf Girl

All Creatures Great and Small

To Kill A Mockingbird

A Separate Peace

Fahrenheit 451

Are Liberal, Conservative, or Confused?

 

Some of these are a little grim, so I decided against Lord of the Flies this year and added All Creatures Great and Small. We'll read Animal Farm if we have time.

 

Karen

[mom31257]

My 8th dd will be doing SL Core 100. The list is here. I know there will be others, but I'm not sure yet what those are. She always picks books to read on her own. She wants to, during middle and high school, read all the major classics. Over the summer, I hope to help her schedule those out.