Ella Said:

Teacher needs help with 6th and 8th grade language arts.?

We Answered:

You might consider a student newspaper. I own a small business that helps schools, clubs, etc. run an inexpensive online student newspaper.

It is a web based application so as long as the students have access to a computer they can contribute articles.

Lois Said:

Teacher needs help with 6th and 8th grade language arts.?

We Answered:

Narrative, expository, descriptive, and persuasive. And I sooo get the "I'm an elementary teacher; what do older kids need to know?" bit!

I don't know about "creative", but for narrative you can have them do a personal narrative about their favorite vacation, something interesting that happened last week, or even a dream or made up story. They could also try a newspaper article following the 5 W's and H.

For expository, a how-to (how to make a sandwich, how to make your bed, anything), a report on an animal or a country. Explaining why or how anything.

For persuasive, they could do an essay on why they should be getting more allowance, get to stay up later, have fewer chores, get to play more video games, have their own car when they're 15 ..... tons of choices!

For descriptive, well, you could start with describing their bedroom, describing their pet, describe each other, describe their perfect day. I don't think I'd try having them describe YOU, though, 'cause you might get a surprise!

You might have them help to critique each other's papers (not right away!), saying what they liked about it and what they'd like to know more about it. (Like in an animal report: I liked the description of where it lives. I'd like to know more about how it gets its food.)

I assume that you're also supposed to cover capitalization, punctuation, and usage, choosing more vivid words and writing better more varied sentences, as well as The Writing Process. You can use their own sentences to pick out parts of speech and parts of sentences, and talk about the types of sentences -- declarative, interrogative, exclamatory, imperative, as well as simple, compound, complex, and compound/complex. Don't forget phrases, clauses, fragments and run-ons and how to correct fragments and run-ons.

Good luck!

Kelly Said:

Teacher needs help with 6th and 8th grade language arts.?

We Answered:

In my junior high courses, we usually picked a book of our own and did a related project (writing a poem or making a book cover with a plot and author's biography). I think the best activities are the ones that test critical reading.

If they're studying grammar, you could also make games to test the parts of speech (like mad-libs) or work on sentence diagrams. I know a lot of high school students who have no idea how to diagram sentences, and they usually have difficulty understanding complex literature because of that.

As for an extended project, you could try assigning a research paper and allow the student to pick the topic. In addition to the paper, they could also make an oral presentation (with a poster or powerpoint) to show what they learned.