This work is a stepping stone towards developing higher order shell element for simulating composite manufacturing procedure. In this study, a continuum approach suitable for combined material and geometrically nonlinear analysis for an eight node solid shell element SS8 is explained. The formulation of SS8 comprises two ingredients to alleviate undesirable locking effects: 1) Assumed Natural Strain concept, which has proven to alleviate the curvature thickness and transverse shear locking problems. 2) Enhanced Assumed Strain, which adds enhanced degrees of freedom to improve the in-plane response of the element and the curvature thickness locking problem. This formulation has been extended to represent geometric and material non-linearity using Total Lagrangian approach. Finally, finite strain formulation has been verified by numerical examples. Results when compared to continuum shell element in ABAQUS show a reasonable agreement with a relative error of less than 2%.