Literary Analysis in Grade 8

Our 8th grade students have just finished a literature circle around the theme of dysotopian societies. Literature circles are a teaching method where teachers select a particular question or theme (or topic, or genre, etc) to explore. Teachers identify a set of novels that can be used to explore the theme, and students read the novel of their choice. Students work in groups with other students who have selected the same novel.

For this literature circle unit, students chose from a collection of thirteen high-interest dystopian novels and spent several weeks reading, discussing, and analyzing the texts. The culminating activity is a literary analysis paper that students are working on right now. Below are the literary analysis questions. In today's classes, students were peer editing draft essays. In addition to applying grammar lessons on commas and sentence structure, students were analyzing each other's thesis sentences, signal phrases, claims, and supporting quotations.