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I've been thinking about English credits for my rising 9th grader. In the new WTM(pg. 662), Susan Bauer recommends assigning 1 credit for English and 1 credit for World Literature as an elective if you do a great books study. This is in addition to the history credit.

 

My dd is not ready to read ancient literature on her own, but we are going to do it together , and I think I'm going to assign the extra lit credit. I anticipate that we will need to spend a minimum of an hour/day reading, discussing, and writing about ancient lit.

 

As I was reading through some old threads this evening, I noticed that Lori D. does the same thing(although it sounds like she includes extra lit just for the English credit). Makes me feel better!:)

 

Something else SWB recommended at the conference which I did not see in her book is to work through the book Essential Literary Terms: a Brief Norton Guide with Exercises. She suggested starting at page 32, reading about the term and its definition, writing about it in a notebook, writing an example, and doing the exercises. She said to do this once a week. We plan to do this as part of our English credit.

 

I'm interested to hear how others have approached this.

 

Caroline

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I've been thinking about English credits for my rising 9th grader. In the new WTM(pg. 662), Susan Bauer recommends assigning 1 credit for English and 1 credit for World Literature as an elective if you do a great books study. This is in addition to the history credit.

 

My dd is not ready to read ancient literature on her own, but we are going to do it together , and I think I'm going to assign the extra lit credit. I anticipate that we will need to spend a minimum of an hour/day reading, discussing, and writing about ancient lit.

 

As I was reading through some old threads this evening, I noticed that Lori D. does the same thing(although it sounds like she includes extra lit just for the English credit). Makes me feel better!:)

 

Something else SWB recommended at the conference which I did not see in her book is to work through the book Essential Literary Terms: a Brief Norton Guide with Exercises. She suggested starting at page 32, reading about the term and its definition, writing about it in a notebook, writing an example, and doing the exercises. She said to do this once a week. We plan to do this as part of our English credit.

 

I'm interested to hear how others have approached this.

 

Caroline

 

Part of what SWB suggests is spending two hours per day on the Great Books study. That's part of the reason she gives it two credits. Generally 150-180 class hours make up one credit. That said, there is no reason your dd should be tackling the great books completely on her own. Absolutely, she'll need a lot of hand-holding, especially in the beginning.

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Yes, it's true that SWB recommends two hours. We will also be working our way through the first part of Spielvogel HO and writing history essays. I also think the Lukeion four week workshops look wonderful and would be great for practicing outlining/note-taking.

 

Thanks for pointing that out.

Caroline

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Yes, it's true that SWB recommends two hours. We will also be working our way through the first part of Spielvogel HO and writing history essays. I also think the Lukeion four week workshops look wonderful and would be great for practicing outlining/note-taking.

 

Thanks for pointing that out.

Caroline

 

My eldest is also going into ninth. Which texts are you thinking of doing? Maybe we could do threads about each work as we go along?

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For sure, the following:

Gilgamesh

the Iliad

the Odyssey

Antigone

Oedipus the King

Metamorphoses

parts of the Aeneid

 

Up in the air about others.

 

I purchased the Teaching Company's Classical Mythology class, but I have yet to preview it. Many of the reading assignments in this course are excerpts from The Homeric Hymns and The Library of Greek Mythology. She also includes Agamemnon, Theogony, and Euripides. We will probably not use this course in its entirety. We also may read only excerpts from these works.

 

I also have Dr. Vandiver's Iliad and Odyssey courses, and I think we will use them. We're going to spend some time this year learning to outline lectures.

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We read things together, so we didn't get through as much as a student working independently would.

 

My older one read Speilvogel, the Idiot's gov book, three Uncle Eric books, and the Zinn US history book. He travelled and peacewalked (an important componant of his history and gov). We read great books together, went through TWEM questions and genre history, usually read something else about the work, and he did some sort of paper or project. He also read a bunch of sci fi books WEM-style. He did some sort of writing program every year. He did vocab one year. He got his grammar via Latin. And he took Comp 1 and Speech at the community college. It all took a huge amount of time, way more than was reasonable to put on his transcript if we based the transcript on Carnegie hours. (I tend to distrust Carnegie hours when it comes to homeschooling because the line between instruction and homework is pretty blurry.) Instead, we gave him one credit each of:

 

Western Civilization

US History

US Government

Ancient Literature and Analysis

Medieval Literature and Analysis

Renaissance and Early Modern Literature and Analysis

Science Fiction

 

And half a credit each of Composition and Speech. He also had five other social studies credits. It worked fine.

 

The youngest will do something similar, I hope, but some of his history and language arts is in French, something I would like his transcript to reflect and have no idea how to do. We'll see what happens. He may decide not to continue the French, in which case the whole thing becomes easier. I have a few years to think about it, since he is just finishing up 9th now.

 

HTH

-Nan

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Nan,

It sounds like you opted not to give the extra English credit and made out just fine without the extra credits.

 

I'll be mulling over this for a while. DD is taking a full year correspondence composition class, which the instructor assures me is worth a credit. In addition to lit response papers, I'm also going to assign one page papers with a thesis as we're reading Spielvogel. She has nonverbal learning disability, and she needs lots practice organizing and writing. I chose Spielvogel over HoAW because it contains so many ideas for essay questions. We're also continuing with R&S 7(not the writing portion), VfCr, and working through the Norton book I mentioned.

 

Maybe I'll give her one separate credit for the composition class this year and assign one credit each for English and History. I really want to assign her 1 credit each for history, English, and lit, but I don't want to compromise her transcript. Nothing is a breeze for this kid. She will probably go to cc for at least the first couple of years, but I don't want to limit her. I could see her doing well at a very small, structured college, too. And, who knows what changes the next four years will bring?

 

Thanks for sharing how you've handled this, Nan. I'm thinking.

Now, to go look up peacewalking.

Caroline

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I started out with composition and lit on his transcript every year, but in the end, when I had to make the final transcript for him to apply to college (spring of junior year), I could see that he had plenty of credits. I thought it might water down his transcript if I gave him too many credits, so I changed my plan. I didn't show the transcript to anybody, so I could redo it as many times as I liked over the years. I gave our school system a list of courses he had completed and just said at the top that this was what he had done so far, but that I wasn't going to decide until the end how to break it up into courses and credits. I say something about homeschooling being flexible and us schooling year-round and explain that some courses are done intensively in less than a year and others done a little at a time over several years, making it hard to determine these things until the end. I had no trouble with that approach. In the end I made a traditional transcript (more or less) and included a school profile letter that explained how we had actually accomplished the things on the transcript. That last was where I explained that it wasn't all done the traditional way, year by year. I think it worked because I was open about how exactly I had "translated" our homeschooling into a traditional transcript. I kept it simple and underestimated by enough that I was comfortable. I had outside verification (SAT scores and CC classes). Anyway, I think you will find that having enough credits isn't a problem, and that you can rearrange at the end if need be.

-Nan

 

Editing to add:

Mine struggled with writing, too, which is why we did so much of it. I think doing TWTM for high school, with its emphasis on developing academic skills, not finishing textbooks, it is probably inevitable that everything you do won't show up on the transcript.

Edited by Nan in Mass
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I am under an association (that I love) and am not allowed to give more than one credit for English each year (comp/grammar/lit/vocab/spelling). If we do more reading and composition than what would normally comprise a literature course, then we bump it up to honors.

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Wow, that is strange about only one English credit per year. Both of my kids who have been in high school and myself in Public school, ending up with more that 4 English credits since we all used electives to do extra English. My son did public speaking and Sci Fi/Fantasy lit. I did Drama and Journalism. My middle is currently doing Novel writing. This was beyond the normal English classes which were a combination of reading literature and writing.

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