This volume of Ready-to-Use Writing Proficiency Lessons & Activities gives classroom teachers and language arts specialists a powerful and effective tool for addressing curriculum standards and competencies at the eighth-grade level and preparing their students for comprehensive assessment testing.Writing Proficiency Lessons & Activities books are also available from Jossey-Bass at the fourth-grade level and the tenth-grade level.
Included are a variety of easy-to-use, reproducible activity sheets that provide application and review the basic language skills as well as extensive practice in producing the types of writing called for in standardized tests.
For easy use, the 240-plus student activity sheets are printed in a big 8-1/2" x 11" format that lays flat for photocopying. The activities are organized into nine sections. Here is just a sample of the topics covered in Sections 1-5:

• CHOOSING THE RIGHT WORD words often confused, prefixes, suffixes, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, adverbs vs. adjectives, sensory words, similes, metaphors, and double negatives
• MAKING MECHANICS AND USAGE WORK FOR YOU apostrophes, hyphens, end marks, commas, semicolons, colons, quotation marks, titles, and misplaced modifiers.
• WRITING SENTENCES subjects and predicates, subject-verb agreement, simple and compound sentences, complex sentences, sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and sentence types.
• WRITING PARAGRAPHS writing a topic sentence, writing a concluding sentence, developing the topic, using tense consistently, using transitional words, and staying on the topic.
• ESSAY-WRITING TECHNIQUES: brainstorming, clustering, outlining, writing an introductory paragraph with a question or a surprising statement, developing the topic using examples, avoiding irrelevant details, writing a concluding paragraph, proofreading, and writing a five-paragraph essay.

The activities in Sections 6-9 take students through the steps in the writing process to develop from six to eight writing samples on various age-appropriate topics in each of the following genres required on state tests:
WRITING INFORMATIVE ESSAYS
WRITING PERSUASIVE ESSAYS
WRITING NARRATIVE ESSAYS
WRITING LETTERS
Each section is preceded by detailed teacher lesson plans and followed by a practice test focusing on the concepts and skills covered in the section, plus answer keys and scoring guides with student writing samples. These practice tests will help students prepare for the types of questions they will be asked on actual tests.
All three volumes-- 4th Grade, 8th Grade, and 10th Grade-- provide a wealth of useful and practical lessons to help students master basic language skills and prepare to demonstrate effective writing on standardized tests. In addition, the companion books Reading Proficiency Lessons & Activities-- fourth-grade, eighth-grade, and tenth-grade levels-- give classroom teachers and reading specialists another dynamic and progressive way to meet curriculum standards and competencies.