My eighth grade class noticed that I have not written much about them on my blog, and demanded that I remedy it with a post just about them. I also need to step up my blogging game if I'm going to make my 25 blog challenge by May. So here we go! These guys and gals have kept me on my toes, and we have had an amazingly productive and exciting year. We started second trimester off with pen pal letters, which we are continuing through the end of the year. We read The Diary of Anne Frank , the play, and created some Google Draw posters to apply character analysis. Click to see an example. We read some scary stories, like "The Tell Tale Heart" and "The Monkey's Paw". The students wrote a psychological profile for the character in "Tell Tale" using text-based evidence. Then we wrote shared scary stories where the students wrote a line, then switched notebooks with a table partner and kept adding sentences. That resulted in some creative and stran...