Ideas for teaching Sonlight British Lit

[historybuffmom]

I'm teaching a class using Sonlight's British Literature. Sonlight recommends 24 titles plus "Sound and Sense" for the poetry unit. I have three issues related to the titles Sonlight recommends plus a few titles I've added. See titles below.* 1- I'm trying to minimize the cost of buying books since they're already buying the Sonlight copyright fees for the student pages from my teacher's manual. I've already given the moms all the typical advice--ie buy discount, used, borrow or library. Do you recommend any of the titles be studied as excerpts vs entire text? (I always like entire text but I'm trying to consider the needs of all of my students.) 2-Some of my students have the ability and time to read and write about all 24 titles, some don't. I've decided to teach 18 titles to everyone. Whoever wants to can do the "Advanced track" and read additional titles with accompanying writing assignments. Any thoughts which titles should be for everyone, which more advanced? 3- Sonlight recommends "Sound and Sense" for the poetry unit for $80. I found it in Rainbow Resource for $65 but it's still to much for my moms to pay. Anyone used this? Can I just buy it and use it as a teacher's manual and have students get poetry from Gutenberg Press or some such place? Rainbow Resource recommends a poetry unit by Progeny Press for about $20 they said is almost as good. Anyone used it? Thanks for any feedback you can give me whether you've used Sonlight British Lit or some other curriculum. *18 Titles for "standard" class: Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Canterbury Quintet, The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Hamlet, The Importance of Being Earnest, Peter Pan, Frankenstein, A Tale of Two Cities, Gulliver's Travels, A Midsummer's Night Dream, Pride and Prejudice, The Hobbit, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, Mere Christianity, Murder on the Orient Express, Passage to India, Right Ho, Jeeves 12 Titles for "advanced" track: Emma, Wuthering Heights, Dubliners, The Great Divorce, Lord of the Flies, Paradise Lost, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Jane Eyre, Ivanhoe, Pygmalion, The Best of Father Brown, The Secret Sharer & other stories

[mooooom]

on Amazon for a few dollars. I would also imagine that anything inside of it could also be found free online (the poetry, that is). Sound and Sense also has explanations (probably not the right word) about what it is teaching - and if the student has to read those, then you'd have to photocopy those parts for them. Most of the books you are listing are classics that can be found in paperback, in libraries, book sales, etc, but if you are teaching a bunch of kids from the same town, I would imagine it would be harder. SL is never a cheap option, unfortunately.

[Chris in VA]

You could easily excerpt Sherlock Holmes. The ones that have been recommended to me are The Red-Headed League, A Study in Scarlet, and The Adventures of the Blue Carbuncle.

 

What--no Poe? :D I didn't see any on your list.

 

I have the Progeny Press poetry guide--it uses 3 extremely cheap, little anthologies (I think they are about 2 bucks each at RR) that are nice to have on hand. I like it alot--I'm adding it to the Brit Lit/Am Lit combo we are doing to fill in some gaps.

 

Oh, and there's a fun website that has a good review of Lord of the Flies in a little game format

here.

[historybuffmom]

Just did Poe this last year with American Lit. Ok curriculum with Stobaugh. Liked his focus on world views. Did you know Poe was an existentialist? I love that with homeschooling--no matter how good an education we moms got--we're always learning along with our kids.

[homeschoolmomof6]

My daughter and I just finished British Literature. Here are my thoughts. If you want to read 18 books you could probably skip The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Right Ho, Jeeves, Pygmalio, Passage to India, The Secret Sharer and Other Stories, and the Great Divorce. These were the books the my daughter disliked the most and I didn't see real significance in them. Depending on the amount of time you have to teach the class you could just buy one edition of Sound and Sense and do that together during your class time. Meaning you could read the poem to the class and discuss rather than doing it as an at home assignment. The poetry was good, but could be skipped if necessary. Let me know if you have anymore questions.

Blessings,

Amanda

[historybuffmom]

Amanda

 

 

Thanks for your info. Is very helpful. A couple more questions. Sonlight didn't arrange their literature chronologically or by genre but it seemed to be organized in order to provide variety. When I checked with SL curriculum advisor to confirm that, she said yes, SL felt best to follow difficult bk w/ easy one. But, she said, I could rearrange book order no problem.

 

 

Questions:

 

 

1- Did you follow the Sonlight book order and how did that work? Do you think reading the books chronologically would have worked better?

 

 

 

2- Do you agree with advisor that each work is stand alone and the student pages don't build one on another so I can rearrange book list order?

[Chris in VA]

OH BIG, BIG DUUUUHHHH! Of course Poe is American!!!

 

Geez, the brain cells,

the brain cells are slowly, slowly dying.

[homeschoolmomof6]

I most definintely agree with the curriculum advisor. Each book can be used as a stand alone unit and they do not build on each other like other Sonlight Cores did. I used British Literature along with Core 400 Government (DD did the Literature from Core 400 with American History). There is no reason to rearrange them in chronological order. They do arrange the IG to do one easy book and then one hard book, but if you're going to skip books anyway there's really no reason to worry about it.

Blessings,

Amanda

[historybuffmom]

Thanks for all the ideas and especially specifics from recent experience from Amanda. It helped me realize that I always teach literature in an historical context because I don't think literature should be read and discussed and analyzed in a vacuum. History influences literature and literature influences history (ever heard of John Locke?). So even though Sonlight arranged the books somewhat randomly, I had fun tonight arranging the choices I've made from their list (and a few favorites of my own) chronologically and categorizing them into several historical periods. It'll help me remind the class what was going on socially, politically, spiritually and economically as we delve into a novel.

 

 

 

And since my son (who will be in the class) is studying British history this year as well, it'll be a double bonus for him.

 

 

 

Thanks again to everyone. And if anyone has any additional thoughts, I'll take any and all ideas/advice. :grouphug:

[Chris in VA]

We really liked Heart of Darkness by Conrad. Ds watched Apocalypse Now afterwords and compared it--he's going to study film and is 18.

[historybuffmom]

Thanks for so much detail Eliana. It's great to get different opinions so I can weigh them all and then decide what's best for my situation. I'm afraid it reinforces though a friend's reaction after reviewing my very long list when I first started the process of preparing for this class. She said. "You just have to come to the realization that you can't cover all the highlights of British Literature in one year." So true! What I love about homeschooling however is that we can each take our philosophy of education and the temperaments and interests of our kids and tailor fit a course like this to our needs.

 

 

Since the public school kids (in my area anyway) aren't even offered British Lit in high school, any fairly decent list of classics will put them miles ahead of where they'd be otherwise.:thumbup: