I teach 7th-12th grade math classes, and I organize my classes around the Modules view rather than the Syllabus. (I "hid" everything but Home, Modules, Grades, and Announcements in my sidebar, so students don't even see that the class HAS a "syllabus" since they aren't used to having them in our school. I have a separate Page titled "Course Expectations" that covers the "rules" side of a syllabus.)
I organize each week into its own Module, so students know where to look for the current week's activities and assignments. I don't generally show all future weeks, although I'll sometimes show a few weeks in advance. (It depends on the course - I teach 6 different classes.) I start my planning by making a special course called my "weeks shell" each term that contains nothing but appropriately-titled empty modules ("Week 1", "Week 2",...,"Finals Week"). I then share that course to my local commons and import it into each new course I'm teaching. I make sure all of the unfinished Modules for future weeks are unpublished, and don't publish them until I feel like I've gotten them polished up and ready to go (and want students to be able to work ahead that far). (I also have a "Course Information" Module at the top before the Weeks Modules where things like my Course Expectations, list of Course Standards, and assorted tutorials live.)
Unless you have a school policy that says you have to have the whole term planned in advance and that information distributed to students on the first day, for 8th grade I recommend just telling students that you will let them know what is going on week-by-week (or unit-by-unit, or whatever format you are used to using) as the term progresses, then explain how they can tell where they are supposed to be and what they are supposed to do. When teaching in a building in my pre-Canvas days, I never attempted to give students specifics (down to the level of which specific homework problems would be assigned) more than a week at a time. I teach online mostly the same way, which works in my particular online school because we hold students to a specific school calendar rather than self-paced.
I've been teaching over a decade now, and in that time I've had exactly one 8th grader who, if given a detailed list of what will need to be done by the end of the year, would simply sit down and get done with it all by the end of the first semester as long as I left him alone with a complete list for the year (my class actually was set up that way that year, and so I let him work on the next class in the spring instead). The rest of them need regular check-ins and guidance anyway, so limiting how much of the course they see at the beginning can be part of helping them focus and not feel overwhelmed.
I guess I always saw it as in college, I needed to see the syllabus during add/drop so I could decide if I needed to drop the class based on the expected workload. 8th graders don't generally have that option, so what they need at the start of the class is a clear explanation of the rules and procedures, and then regular updates on their next set of tasks and deadlines as the year goes on.
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