How to Homeschool Eighth Grade

How to Homeschool Eighth Grade

Before you start homeschooling eighth grade, there are some steps you should take.

• Learn about your state’s homeschooling requirements so you follow the law
• Pick a curriculum that best suits your family’s needs
• Create a homeschool classroom or select a room where you will homeschool
• Create a schedule and set your homeschool objectives and goals
• Make plans to track your child’s progress
• Find any homeschool groups in your area
• Assess progress

When homeschooling an 8th grader, there’s a sequence you should follow to ensure that your child is learning the skills necessary for success. Use our eighth grade scope and sequence page to plan out the year.

What Schedule is Best for an Eighth Grader?

Setting up a schedule for your eighth grader will depend on what works best for your family, especially if you work outside the home. You may want to homeschool in the morning or afternoon, while other homeschoolers schedule classes in the evening.

As far as how much time you should be spending homeschooling each day, three or four hours is generally sufficient. Many homeschoolers teach in 20 to 30 minute blocks and provide breaks in between. For instance, you might want to homeschool four days a week or take a half day on Fridays, or homeschool all year long with a few vacation breaks — it all depends on your family’s situation.

Homeschooling Planner

Start planning out your homeschooling days with this free easy to use daily planner.

Get Started With This Daily Planner

Which Subjects Are Taught in Eighth Grade

A typical course of study for eighth grade homeschoolers includes:

• Language arts
• Math
• Social studies
• Science
• Health and safety
• Physical fitness program
• Electives (or a hobby that your child enjoys)

You should look up your state’s rules and find out if they have any required subjects for homeschoolers. Also, homeschooling is flexible, so you can choose from any number of electives.

Eighth Grade Learning Objectives

Meeting the eighth grade learning objectives is important for your child’s future progress. They should be familiar with more complicated concepts, theories, and practices in their core subjects.

Generally speaking, they should be able to understand the following topics by the end of eighth grade:

• In English Language Arts:
• Understand synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, and idioms and have a working understanding of suffixes, prefixes, and reading skills.
• Develop reading comprehension skills such as summarizing, predicting, visualizing, questioning, and clarifying.
• Accurately apply punctuation, grammar, and syntax skills when writing.
• In Mathematics:
• Identify rational and irrational numbers.
• How to represent numbers in base ten in other types of bases, how to identify prime and composite numbers.
• Understand ratio, proportion, and percent.
• Recognize properties of parallelism, perpendicularity, and symmetry and how they can be applied to solve real world problems.
• Use statistics, mean, median, mode, technology use, central tendency, statistical plots, and scatterplots to interpret various types of data.
• In Science:
• Understand Earth’s structure, geologic processes, oceans and the water cycle, Earth’s atmosphere, weather and climate, our solar system, stars, and galaxies.
• Understand chemistry and physics, including physical and chemical changes, atoms and elements, mixtures and solutions, the periodic table.
• Identify plant and animal cell structures, the characteristics of unicellular and multicellular life, genetics, classification of organisms.

Reading Book List for Eighth Grade

There is no shortage of books that your eighth grader can read. The following is just a short list of some recommended titles to help you get started:

• The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
• Looking for Alaska by John Green
• Out of Dust by Karen Hesse
• The Giver by Lois Lowry
• The Book of Thief by Markus Zusak

Try to encourage them to read the news, magazines, online articles, and more. Avid reading encourages learning and expands their knowledge on many different subjects and expands their vocabulary.

How Time4Learning Can Help You Homeschool Your Eighth Grader

Over 600,000 families have trusted Time4Learning with their children’s education in some capacity, whether it be their full-time curriculum, skill builder program, or summer learning program. Children love the curriculum because it is computer-based with interactive lessons, parents appreciate it because of the built-in tools that make their day less stressful.

Time4Learning can help your children master more difficult concepts, reach their eighth grade learning objectives, and become more independent learners, Time4Learning offers:

• A comprehensive curriculum with lessons in language arts, math, social studies and science geared toward helping students meet their eighth grade objectives.
• An interactive, computer based program that teaches complicated concepts and strategies in an engaging and entertaining manner.
• Multimedia lessons that feel more like video games making it perfect for building new skills.
• An automated tracking system that keeps track of test and lesson scores, time spent on each activity completed lesson summaries and more.
• An automatic grading and reporting system that makes keeping records easy and helps parents keep important information for future portfolios.
• A program that encourages independent learning and allows students to learn at their own pace.
• Access to detailed printable lesson plans and homeschool teaching tools to review lesson content.
• The flexibility to access lessons 24/7, so you can customize your homeschool schedule to meet your family’s needs.
• A safe, secure, and ad free online learning environment.
• Activity scheduling programs and parental support through our online Parent Forum.