Less than $5 8th Grade Writing-Essays Resources (by date, oldest first)

Get ready for argumentative units with this engaging activity centered around persuasive techniques in rhetorical devices, and logical fallacies.

Teacher students what makes a good and bad argument with a short lesson and 5 practice paragraphs to evaluate for effectiveness. Afterwards, students can practice rhetorical devices in advertisements and analyze why the device was chosen (author's purpose).

ALSO INCLUDED IS AN EXTENSION ACTIVITY where students can get creative and make their own ads.

- Teacher directions

- Grading Rubric

- Student instructions

- Research and Brainstorm document

(no templates for creation are included)

PROVIDED IN WORD/POWERPOINT & PDF

An easy to read format to get your students writing!

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Looking to help your students master the passive voice for standardized tests like the STAAR? This 16-page resource is your go-to guide for teaching passive voice with a gradual increase in complexity.

Start with the basics of identifying subjects and verbs in sentences, then progress to understanding direct objects and other key components essential for a full grasp of passive voice. This packet is designed to make learning passive voice engaging and effective.

Included are:

• 5 Pages of handouts to make sure to make sure students understand each part of passive voice.
• Practice pages that progressively challenge students, ensuring they can identify and use passive voice with confidence.
• Exercises in evaluating and revising sentences, crucial for mastering the revising sections of tests.
• 2 editing passages for applied practice, perfect for honing skills in a test-like environment.

Ideal for both classroom use and independent practice, this resource is an excellent tool for students in middle and high school.

• Do you need help getting your students to understand how text is structured and how authors craft their writing?
• Do you want them to practice aligning ideas and writing their own?

Help your students master paragraph structure with this comprehensive resource designed for middle and high school learners. "Building Strong Paragraphs" focuses on key writing skills such as identifying topic sentences, supporting details, and crafting thesis statements. This ready-to-use packet includes practice worksheets, engaging exercises, and thesis sentence-building activities that will enhance your students' writing abilities.

Ideal for both informational and argumentative writing, this resource walks students through the entire process of constructing well-organized, coherent paragraphs. Whether you're teaching how to develop supporting sentences, transition between ideas, or conclude effectively, this resource covers it all!

What's Included:

• Graphic Organizer for understanding structure
• Identification exercise
• Two Unique Passages per skill: topic sentences, thesis statements, supporting sentences & concluding sentences
• 9 Passages
• 20 Pages
• Available as a PDF and a Word Document

Perfect for:

• Grades 6-10
• English Language Arts (ELA) Teachers
• Writing Workshops
• STAAR Writing Prep
• Argumentative and Informational Essay Practice

Benefits of this Resource:

• Aligned with Common Core Standards and TEKS for writing.
• Great for differentiated learning in classrooms with ELLs and students needing extra practice.
• Supports critical thinking and writing clarity.

Who is this for?

• Middle and High School Teachers: Perfect for educators looking to strengthen their students’ paragraph-writing skills with structured, step-by-step activities.
• ELA Teachers: Aligned with TEKS and Common Core standards, this resource is ideal for anyone teaching informational and argumentative writing.
• Students Preparing for Standardized Tests: Great for test prep, including STAAR writing, helping students improve clarity, coherence, and overall writing structure.
• Special Education & ELL Support: Easily adaptable for differentiated instruction, making it an excellent tool for classrooms with diverse learners, including English Language Learners and students with varying writing levels.
• Homeschool Educators: A valuable resource for guiding students through the fundamentals of paragraph writing at home.

Graphic organizers can be helpful as a visual aid when students are writing.

• Helps students focus on their thoughts for planning, decision-making, and writing an essay

• Helps students see the connections, patterns, and relationships between facts, concepts, and ideas 

• Organizers provide a visual depiction for writers by showing them where each piece of the essay is placed within an essay

Persuasive essay maps are used as a visual aid to map out points and arguments for a persuasive essay or debate.

• 1st - determine your claim or thesis
• 2nd - identify three (3) reasons to support the claim or thesis
• 3rd - identify three (3) facts or examples to validate each reason

I hope your students/children enjoy this concept map by understanding the importance of why a graphic organizer is needed, as well as understanding the variables of a concept map.

The Persuasive Essay Map is in Google Slides, Powerpoint, and PDF formats.

Happy Writing!

Tina Arozena

Big Easy Homeschooling Mom

Graphic organizers can be helpful in being visual aids when students are writing.

• Helps students focus on their thoughts for planning, decision-making, and writing an essay

• Helps students see the connections, patterns, and relationships between facts, concepts, and ideas 

• Organizers provide a visual depiction for writers by showing them where each piece of the essay is placed within an essay

Bubble maps are used to display two different main ideas, their similarities, and their differences.

I hope your students/children enjoy this bubble map by understanding the importance of why a graphic organizer is needed, as well as understanding the variables of a bubble map.

Bubble map is in Google Slides, Powerpoint, and PDF formats.

Happy Writing!

Tina Arozena

Big Easy Homeschooling Mom

Follow me on social media:

Social Media Links

Graphic organizers can be helpful as a visual aid when students are writing.

• Helps students focus on their thoughts for planning, decision-making, and writing an essay

• Helps students see the connections, patterns, and relationships between facts, concepts, and ideas 

• Organizers provide a visual depiction for writers by showing them where each piece of the essay is placed within an essay

Narrative plot graphic organizer:

• Starts with the introduction or exposition
• Followed by the rising action of the story
• Rising action hits a climax
• After the climax is the falling action
• From the falling action, we come to the conclusion

I hope your students/children enjoy this concept map by understanding the importance of why a graphic organizer is needed, as well as understanding the variables of a concept map.

The Narrative Plot Graphic Organizer is in Google Slides, Powerpoint, and PDF formats.

Happy Writing!

Tina Arozena

Big Easy Homeschooling Mom

Graphic organizers can be helpful in being visual aids when students are writing.

• Helps students focus on their thoughts for planning, decision-making, and writing an essay

• Helps students see the connections, patterns, and relationships between facts, concepts, and ideas 

• Organizers provide a visual depiction for writers by showing them where each piece of the essay is placed within an essay

Concept maps are used to display a main idea within the concept and the different ideas that branch out from the main idea.

I hope your students/children enjoy this concept map by understanding the importance of why a graphic organizer is needed, as well as understanding the variables of a concept map.

Concept map is in Google Slides, Powerpoint, and PDF formats.

Happy Writing!

Tina Arozena

Big Easy Homeschooling Mom

Graphic organizers are helpful as a visual aid when students are writing.

-Helps students focus on their thoughts for planning, decision-making, and writing an essay

-Helps students see the connections, patterns, and relationships between facts, concepts, and ideas

-Organizers provide a visual depiction for writers by showing them where each piece of the essay is placed within an essay

Opinion Writing Graphic Organizer:

-Introduction

-1st, 2nd & 3rd reason you disagree

-Counterargument with 3 opposing views

-Rebuttal to opposing views

-Conclusion

I hope your students/children enjoy this concept map by understanding the importance of why a graphic organizer is needed, as well as understanding the variables of a concept map.

The Opinion Writing Graphic Organizer is in Google Slides, PowerPoint, and PDF formats.

Happy Writing!

Tina Arozena

Big Easy Homeschooling Mom

Graphic organizers can be helpful as a visual aid when students are writing.

• Helps students focus on their thoughts for planning, decision-making, and writing an essay

• Helps students see the connections, patterns, and relationships between facts, concepts, and ideas 

• Organizers provide a visual depiction for writers by showing them where each piece of the essay is placed within an essay

Spider maps are used to display the main concept or idea in a circle in the middle of the map and supporting ideas branch off from the main concept circle.

I hope your students/children enjoy this concept map by understanding the importance of why a graphic organizer is needed, as well as understanding the variables of a concept map.

The Spider Map is in Google Slides, Powerpoint, and PDF formats.

Happy Writing!

Tina Arozena

Big Easy Homeschooling Mom

Graphic organizers can be helpful in being visual aids when students are writing.

• Helps students focus on their thoughts for planning, decision-making, and writing an essay

• Helps students see the connections, patterns, and relationships between facts, concepts, and ideas 

• Organizers provide a visual depiction for writers by showing them where each piece of the essay is placed within an essay

Venn Diagrams show the relationship between two ideas. A venn diagram can have two or more circles. When the circles overlap, the venn diagram shows the similarities between the two or more ideas. In the spaces where the circles do not overlap, it shows the differences between the two or more ideas.

I hope your students/children enjoy this compare & contrast by understanding the importance of why a graphic organizer is needed, as well as understanding the variables of a Venn Diagram.

Venn Diagram Graphic Organizer is in Google Slides, Powerpoint, and PDF formats.

Happy Writing!

Tina Arozena

Big Easy Homeschooling Mom

Follow me on social media:

Social Media Links

This word sleuth will provide your students/children with a fun journey in writing ELA Essays with key vocabulary words. It can be done in class, centers, or as a fun homework assignment.

Word sleuth is in PPTX format along with the answer key.

If you and your students/children, enjoy this activity, please go to your purchases and let me a review.

Please follow me on social media: linktr.ee/tidewindacademy

Tina

Big Easy Homeschooling Mom

Explain the effects of cell phone addiction. This is an informative essay prompt, two articles, a graph, and outline sheet. Your kids will all learn something about cell phones that they may never thought of before. This comes complete with rubric

Should schools ban soda? This is an argumentative essay prompt, three articles, and outline sheet. Your kids will all have their own opinions about sugary drinks and whether or not schools should ban soda. This comes complete with rubric.

Google Drive Version can be found here

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Should students be allowed to use cell phones in school? This is an argumentative essay prompt, two articles, a graph, and outline sheet. Your kids will all have their own opinions about cell phone usage and whether or not schools should ban cell phones. This comes complete with rubric. This is a pdf.

*Update* Available under TeachShare Digital Resources which adds an interactive layer on top of the pdf for distance learning.

If you want the Google Drive editable version here it is

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This includes two Articles "How do hurricanes form? A step-by-step guide" and "How Do Hurricanes Form?" plus a graph titled "Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale" . After reading these two articles students are given a prompt for an expository essay on how hurricanes are formed. There is also an outline sheet included for students to use in order to help them organize their essay. Plus a rubric for easy grading of final essay.

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Should students be required to wear school uniforms? This is an argumentative essay prompt, two articles, a graph, and outline sheet. Your kids will all have their own opinions about uniforms and whether or not schools should require uniforms. This comes complete with rubric. This is a pdf.

If you want the Google Drive editable version

CLICK HERE

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Digital Task Cards are a great way to help your students with claim, counterclaim, and rebuttal! These cards can work on a computer or mobile device! No printing of cutting just assign the deck to your students and you are ready to go! Boom Learning is free to sign up for. Students get immediate feedback and teachers can take advantage of reporting tools. Easy and effective! Great for distance learning or in a digital classroom. A total of 20 task cards.

*****READ MORE ABOUT BOOM CARDS: Boom Cards are self-grading, DIGITAL resources. They live in the cloud. They can't be printed. They play on most modern browsers, Android, iPads, iPhones, and Kindle Fires. You open a Boom Learning℠ account to play them (to protect the children). Create Fast Play pins to assign your Boom Cards to students.

Boom Learning also has premium accounts. Premium accounts offer advanced assignment tools, individual and whole class performance tracking, and more. If you are a new Boom Learning customer, when you redeem your Boom Cards purchase you get 90-day free trial of a premium account. When your trial ends, you can renew or move to a free account. You may upgrade, downgrade or cancel at any time. Free accounts use purchased Boom Cards with Fast Play pins.

***Did you know??? You can use Boom Cards in Google Classroom™! Just CLICK HERE to find out how!

Should students be required to learn how to write in cursive? This is an argumentative essay prompt, three articles, and outline sheet. Your kids will all have their own opinions about whether or not schools should require students to learn how to write in cursive. This comes complete with rubric.

This is for Google Drive

Looking for more argumentative prompts with articles?

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This includes two Articles "The History of Narcissistic

Personality Disorder" and "Selfies, Facebook, and Narcissism: What's the Link? Exploring the link between Facebook and Narcissism" plus a graph titled "College Students' Narcissistic Personality Inventory Scores 1982-2006" . After reading these two articles students are given a prompt for an expository essay on narcissism. There is also an outline sheet included for students to use in order to help them organize their essay. Plus a rubric for easy grading of final essay.

***** Check out my other Writing Resources*****

Counterclaim and Rebuttal

Interactive Essay Writing Flipbook

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Essay prompt and articles: Hurricanes

Essay prompt and articles: Colonization in Africa