Year 8 English worksheets – Boost comprehension skills

What's included?

PDF worksheets and PowerPoint

Key Stage

KS3

Age

Year 8

Subjects

This Year 8 English worksheets pack contains downloadable worksheets and resources that will expose pupils to 19th-century writing.

Use these resources, themed around Great Expectations, to prompt students to use comprehension, prediction and inference skills. Students will also get practise in analysing writers’ methods.

Great Expectations is a 19th century novel written by Charles Dickens. Use an extract from the novel to prompt pupils to do their own piece of recount writing, written from character Pip’s point of view.

As well as exposing them to 19th century fiction, these Year 8 English worksheets and resources will also give pupils the opportunity to:

practise inference and prediction skills
practise reading and comprehension skills
analyse writers’ methods such as title choice, characterisation, vocabulary choice and juxtaposition

Year 8 English worksheets pack

The pack contains:

Great Expectations extract with vocabulary definitions
PowerPoint teaching slides
Year 8 English worksheets about comprehension, with questions and answers
Planning sheet for writing task

Session 1

Begin the first session by asking pupils to consider the story’s title and genre. Next, read the first few paragraphs of the text before answering simple comprehension questions about what you’ve read.

This activity will encourage pupils to practise their comprehension skills. They’ll need to use evidence from the text to justify their answers.

Students will then go on to think about how Dickens creates fear an sympathy in the opening of Great Expectations. They’ll focus on the writer’s use of characterisation, vocabulary choice and juxtaposition.

Next, they’ll write a What How Why paragraph to answer the question, using appropriate quotes from the text.

Session 2

In the second session, pupils will undertake a retrieval practice task to recap the details of the story. They’ll then move on to planning a piece of writing from Pip’s point of view.

There’s a planning sheet, examples and suggestions for success included in the download to scaffold learners, if necessary.

Year 8 planning worksheet

Pupils need to write a story as if they were Pip telling a close friend what happened to them. Because they’re telling a close friend they should talk openly and informally. The planning Year 8 English worksheet included in this download will help pupils to set out their focus for each paragraph. For example:

Why Pip decided to visit his parents’ graveyard
What Pip felt when he first saw the man
What the man did to him and told him to do
What Pip did next

National curriculum objectives

Develop an appreciation and love of reading, and read increasingly challenging material
Reading high-quality works from English literature, both pre-1914 and contemporary, including prose, poetry and drama
Choosing and reading books independently for challenge, interest and enjoyment
Learning new vocabulary, relating it explicitly to known vocabulary and understanding it with the help of context and dictionaries
Checking their understanding to make sure that what they have read makes sense
Knowing how language, including figurative language, vocabulary choice, grammar, text structure and organisational features, presents meaning
Studying setting, plot, and characterisation, and the effects of these
Write accurately, fluently, effectively and at length for pleasure and information through stories, scripts, poetry and other imaginative writing

Bhamika Bhudia (@MissMika_Eng) is a head of English at a mixed comprehensive secondary school in London. She has also created Year 7 English worksheets.

Download comprehension worksheets for Y1-6.