Year 8

Resources for students in year 8.

Books to support understanding of mental health

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The lives of a huge proportion of children and young people will be touched by mental health issues, whether directly or indirectly. As many as one in ten children and young people aged five to 16 have a diagnosable mental health disorder – that is three in any one classroom.

 

By adulthood, the figure rises to one in four, meaning many children will come into contact with relatives or other adults who are affected.

 

Maintaining good relationships is a fundamental aspect of nurturing good mental health, and this is the theme of the 2016 awareness week.

Find out more here!

World Book Day: The 10 best teen reads

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‘As the sixth What Kids Are Reading report bemoans a tendency among secondary school students to read books that are too easy – suggesting that teachers and librarians aren’t pushing challenging titles strongly enough to older kids – the organisers of World Book Day have announced a list that might serve as a corrective, or at least a useful source of ideas. The Writes of Passage list of popular books for young adults, voted for by 7,000 people across the UK, features a top 10 of books to help “shape and inspire” teenagers, and give them the empathic tools and words to handle some of the challenges of adolescence. The complete list of 50 features books to “help you understand you”, “change the way you think” and “make you cry”, as well as thrill, transport and scare you. And it’s quite substantial. ‘

Check out these lists!

Why English Has Words With Silent Letters

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The English spelling system is famous for not making sense. The phonetic ideal of having each letter represent exactly one sound, and each sound represented by exactly one letter, is impossible when English has about 45 sounds, or phonemes, and only 26 letters to represent them. But more than that, any language that has been written for a long enough time will have spellings that haven’t caught up with modern pronunciations, because pronunciations change.

English has been written for about 1,300 years, which is plenty of time for these mismatches to accumulate. One of the more frustrating signs of these spelling mismatches is English’s abundance of silent letters. With a conservative definition of silent letter, more than half of the letters of our alphabet are silent in at least some words. In alphabetical order, they are B, D, E, G, H, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, W, X, and Z. Today, we’ll find out the stories behind some of these silent letters.

50 Books Every Modern Teenager Should Read

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With all the recent discussion about To Kill a Mockingbird, I was inspired to re-read the #2 Most Classic Novel for Teenagers (#1 is The Catcher in the Rye, of course). And, well, it’s great. But also, it’s not exactly the most relevant thing for teenagers in 2016 — at least not relevant enough that it should be the pinnacle of their reading list, promised to change their minds about everything. As Jenny Slate might say in my favorite Jenny Slate performance of all time: “Everybody can do everything now! I can’t relate to that goddamn story! Just read a frickin’ Dilbert and go to sleep.” Well, let’s not go crazy, because there are tons of great books that are utterly relevant to modern teenagers — or at least should be. From old books to brand-new ones, from YA to poetry, from sci-fi to nonfiction, here are 50 books every modern teenager (and many modern adults) should read.