Year 8 Writing Skills

This course is aligned with the New Zealand National Curriculum and the Cambridge International Education curriculum.

The course is designed to enable students to develop knowledge and practices including:

• Developing proficiency with English spellings for more advanced words.
• Planning and writing for a specific audience and purpose, using different text types with their codes and conventions.
• Deliberately selecting and using a range of language features to shape meaning and influence their audience.  
• Deliberately selecting and using words and phrases that clearly communicate their intended meaning, considering the nuances of synonyms to enhance clarity, impact, and personal voice.
• Writing complex sentences, including compound-complex sentences, to add depth and detail and show ideas are linked.
• Understanding sentence structure for crafting sentences to effectively communicate ideas by combining phrases and clauses.
• Crafting sentences that communicate meaning clearly by correctly using knowledge of grammar (including the central role of the verb in Subject Verb Object and other clause types) and punctuation.
• Writing to entertain, inform, and persuade coherently using carefully selected language, a cohesive structure, and conventions appropriate to the purpose and audience.

The topics per module are:

• Secrets, lies, and spies
• Curious
• Friends and family
• Journeys and jeopardy

Text forms include:

• Extracts from novels and short stories.
• Poetry.
• Media texts, including digital media.
• Blended text forms, such as poems that aim to persuade and narrative texts with factual content.