Lightning Lit 7 as a semester course???

[LNC]

I don't want to give up CLE Reading for literature. It is only a semester though. We do classic novel studies for our second semester. I have previously used Veritas and Logos comprehension guides, but they don't provide any literary analysis. Though they have a lot of value in the grammar stage! Anway, I like what I see in Lightning Lit - it looks like I could make it work for a semester. I saw the weekly planning pages in the Teacher's Guide sample, and I would just schedule two weeks/ week. What do you think?

 

http://www.hewitthomeschooling.com/book/blight.asp

Edited January 4, 2011 by LNC

[Trish]

My son is strong in language arts, so we are doing Lightning Lit for 6th grade. We both find it very interesting, so I'd call it virtually a perfect fit for where he is now. We started in August and will be finishing up this month, so to me it seems to be a one-semester course. I realized I'm probably not following "the schedule" -- I have him start reading, and then we do a page or two of the lesson each day, and also one or two items out of the worksheets. This doesn't seem taxing. I don't see any particular reason to have the reading completed before starting --doing it simultaneously works fine for us as long as he's read far enough for the particular exercise we're doing that day. (I skip around if need be) Our pace does not feel fast, so I guess the recommended pace might seem slow if we tried that.

 

Even though I have never been a particular fan of poetry, we both found those two chapters VERY interesting. The only selection my son didn't enjoy was Helen Keller -- he had read the Annie Sullivan story the year before and didn't want to cover the same material again, so I allowed him to do the exercises and not read the whole autobiography.

 

Everything else was a winner. I was not tempted to slow down our pace, it seemed comfortable. (we didn't do every suggested writing exercise -- I usually had him pick which one he wanted to do)

 

We'll be doing lit guides for the spring, and pick up Lightning Lit 8 for the Fall semester.

[abbeyej]

Yes, very doable more quickly. Some weeks (in their schedule) take a lot more time than others. Most of the reading weeks could be doubled or tripled for a good reader without any difficulty. The worksheet weeks take more time. The writing assignments are generally light, though I might not try to complete more than two writing exercises in a week. (But you could begin reading the next book while finishing the writing assignments for the previous lesson...)