WEEKLY
FOCUS
Week 1
Week 2
Focus on the Authors
Vocabulary Choices
Year 8 English
Learning and Assessment
Term 1, 2012
Homework
TRASH (novel) – Context Study – Human Rights
Key Ideas in TRASH- corruption, freedom of speech, poverty,
human rights, heroism
Reading Part One
Chapters 1-6
Understanding how words take their meanings from the
context of the text.
Recognise how the vocabulary choices in TRASH contribute to
the specificity, abstraction and style of particular text.
Reading Part Two
Chapters 1-4
Extra – Teacher
Driven
Identify and evaluate the devices used by the author that
create tone in TRASH. For example how has the author used
humour, wordplay, innuendo, drama to create effect?
Reading Part
Three
Chapters 1-5
Extra – Teacher
Driven
Understanding how conventions of speech adopted by the
characters and communities in TRASH influence their identities
Reading Part
Three
Chapters 6-10
Extra – Teacher
Driven
Explore the ways that ideas and viewpoints in TRASH are drawn
from different historical, social and cultural contexts and may
reflect or challenge the values of individuals and groups
Reading Part Four
Chapters 1-7
Extra – Teacher
Driven
Writing Task 1 Due – end of Week 5
Students write a short Persuasive Speech on one of the key
ideas and give an Oral Presentation
Reading Part Five
Chapters 1-6
Extra – Teacher
Driven
Week 3
Focus on the language
devices that authors
use to create certain
meanings and effects
in Literary texts
Week 4
Focus on how
language is used to
form identity
Week 5
Focus on how texts
reflect the context of
culture and situation
in which they are
created
Week 5
Focus on Interpreting
the stated and implied
meanings in spoken
texts and use evidence
to support or
challenge different
perspectives
Week 6
Focus on Strategies of
constructing meaning
from texts, including
Literal and Inferential
Meaning
Use Comprehension Strategies to interpret and evaluate TRASH
by reflecting on the validity of content including finding
evidence in the text for the authors point of view
Teacher Driven
Week 7
Focus on creating texts
and how texts work as
cohesive wholes
Understanding how cohesion in the students written text is
improved by strengthening the internal structure of paragraphs
through the use of examples, quotations and substantiation of
claims
Teacher Driven
Week 8
Focus on how
Language is used to
express opinions and
make evaluative
judgements
Understanding how the use of Rhetorical devices in their
writing will persuade others and how different layers of
meaning can be developed through the use of metaphor, irony
and parody
Teacher Driven
Week 9
Writing Task 2 Due – End of Week 9
Students will write a Persuasive Essay on their choice of a
Human Right that they believe to be the most important. They
may use their own research as well as evidence from the novel
TRASH to support their argument