If someone were to make their own Am. Lit or World Lit program, how many books would

[Kelly on the prairie]

I am considering making up a literature program using a variety such as garlic press and progeny press. For high school credit, how many books and papers do you think would be appropriate?

 

I must say we are not big fans of Lord of the Rings (I know, I know...don't fling a goblin at me) however, it would be nice to maybe not use a "formal" program, but rather a variety of our choosing.

 

Now that I write this out, I think am I crazy? Will it be too much extra work?:tongue_smilie:

[Holly IN]

I am very interested in this as well....I am subscribing to this so I can keep tabs...:lurk5:

 

Holly

[Chris in VA]

No, it's what we do. I always try to do too much. You have to know your student well--how many can they handle? WTM suggests anywhere from 8 to 16 Great Books a year--8 is light, but still fine, 16 is pushing it. I like to mix in a little historical fiction about the period, alongside the GB's written *during* the period.

Would our reading lists for Ancients, Medieval, Modern help you? I'll post if you want.

[Kelly on the prairie]

Would our reading lists for Ancients, Medieval, Modern help you? I'll post if you want.

 

Would it?! Would it?! I would be very interested. Do you include a selection of short stories?

 

One of my favorite classes in college was a short stories class and I would love to share a selection of those with my kids.

 

It is so hard to decide. I have been playing with the idea of ordering Teaching the Classics. I love IEW, however, I am competent enough to have implemented it without the DVD set. Maybe I should take the plunge and order the TTC workbook. At least it would be a jumping off point.

[dtsmamtj]

This is pretty much what we are doing this year - creating our own. I have just the IEW workbook (no dvd) for TTC and I am now in the process of chosing our literature books. I would love to see your list Chris in VA as this what we are studying in history. It will depend on the book for what kind of paper to to write or no paper at all. Last year we did 6 literature books plus 2 months of a poetry study. On average we were doing one each month, but Moby Dick and Uncle Toms Cabin took us about 6 weeks each instead of only 4 last year. We also include one Shakespeare and one Charles Dickens when possible. HTH

 

Looking forward see what ideas others have as well.

 

T

[summer]

It is less work than following someone else's schedule. I would just get books from that time period as you feel you want them and read them. How many would depend greatly on the child. What I have would be great for my older, but we will be lucky if dd, who is 12 now, will ever read them. I am hoping a few key books get read though.

[Kareni]

On the topic of short stories, take a look at these two threads (see particularly Eliana's posts in the latter one):

 

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15625&highlight=short+stories

 

and

 

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4540

 

Regards,

Kareni

[HollyinNNV]

Here's the website for the writing/lit class I teach. It will give you an idea of how I have worked out the challenge that you are facing. It is still under construction.

 

http://web.mac.com/hollyk3799/Site_2/Welcome.html

 

Scroll down to find the lit reading list.

The corresponding history is western civ with Spielvogel.

The music page has links, but is not complete yet.

The art page is totally under construction.

The blog will be for student discussion on the various books we read.

 

HTH,

Holly in N NV

 

This is all created by myself because I can't find exactly what I want in another program. The co-op is called WINN (writers institute of northern nevada).

[Jenny in Florida]

In retrospect, it looks light, but it was our first year attempting a WTM-ish curriculum and we were still finding our feet.

 

9th Grade: American History Through Literature and Fiction

We organized the year into a series of five units, each focusing on a social justice issue (the native American experience, slavery and abolition, women’s suffrage, the Holocaust and Japanese internment, desegregation and the civil rights movement). For each unit, my daughter read (or we read aloud together) one “Great Book†(something of the period) and at least one supplemental book, often historical fiction. She wrote a “context page†for each of the primary books and then wrote a longer essay on the topic of her choice at the end of each unit.

 

She also read through Elements of Style, as recommended in TWTM, and did a word roots program. We used two of the Glencoe study guides (available free online at http://www.glencoe.com/sec/literature/litlibrary/ ): The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Slave Dancer. For history, we used a variety of resources, including Freedom: A History of Us by Joy Hakim.

 

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank

Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, Nicholas Black Elk and John G. Neihardt

Crying Rocks, Janet Taylor Lisle

Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne Watasuki Houston & James D. Houston

Malka, Mirjam Pressler

Minuk: Ashes in the Pathway, Kirkpatrick Hill

Mississippi Trial, 1955, Chris Crowe

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave, Frederick Douglass

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Mildred D. Taylor

Secrets on 26th Street, Elizabeth McDavid Jones

Sing Down the Moon, Scott O’Dell

Slave Dancer, Paula Fox

The Bostonians, Henry James

Time for Courage: The Suffragette Diary of Kathleen Bowen, Kathryn Lasky

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

Warriors Don’t Cry, Melba Pattillo Beals

 

[Jenny in Florida]

10th Grade: History and Literature of the Ancient World

 

This year’s studies were organized roughly by region/culture. We did, I think, six units, still with a mix of “Great Books†and supplementary readings. Again, my daughter wrote context pages for each of the major works written during the period being studied. And she did some kind of project, not always a traditional essay, for each unit. (The one I remember most clearly was designing the packaging for a boxed set of The Iliad and The Odyssey, writing a synopsis of each for the cover and creating artwork and so on.)

 

Again, she used a variety of resources for the history part, primarily the National Geographic Visual History of the World and The Mammoth Book of How It Happened: Eyewitness Accounts of History in the Making from 2000 bc to the Present. For the “literary†part, we relied mostly on The Book of Great Books: A Guide to 100 World Classics.

 

“Mu-lan†(poem), Translation from The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady: Interpretations of Chinese Poetry, Hans H. Frankel

“The Ramayana: A ‘Telling’ of the Ancient Indian Epic,†adapted by Larry Tominberg

Antigone, Sophocles

Art of War, Sun Tzu

Bhagavad-Gita, Juan Mascaro (translator)

Bone From a Dry Sea, Peter Dickinson

Dhammapada The Way of Truth, Sangharak****a (translator)

Gilgamesh, John Champlin Gardner

Iliad (selections), Homer (Robert Fitzgerald, translator)

Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare

Lady of Ch'iao Kuo, Warrior of the South, Laurence Yep

Odyssey, Homer (Henry I. Christ, translator)

Popol Vuh : The Definitive Edition Of The Mayan Book Of The Dawn Of Life And The Glories of Gods and Kings, Dennis Tedlock (translator)

Selections from Ancient Egyptian Literature: “The Tale of Sinuhe,†“The Shipwrecked Sailor,†“Great Hymn to the Atenâ€

The Bible: Authorized King James Version With Apochrypha (selections): Genesis, Esther, Exodus, Job, Ruth, Jonah

Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, C.S. Lewis

Tusk and Stone, Malcolm Bosse

[Jenny in Florida]

 

 

11th Grade: History, Literature and Theater of the Middle Ages and Renaissance

 

 

 

This year, we didn’t do units, just a fairly straight up chronological order. We focused on the middle ages (up through about 1500, as I recall) in the first semester, then the Renaissance in the second. As you can see, we still did a mix of “Great Books†and interesting supplemental readings. We continued using the three primary history and literature resources from the previous year, adding some readings from The Well-Educated Mind for more literature background/analysis and two other books for history. She wrote one short historical essay about every other week, using prompts from History Scholar and worked through Wordsmith Craftsman, also. At the end of the year, she did a research project for history (tracing and creating a family tree for the ruling families of England from the Norman Conquest through the 1600s) and another project focusing on the theatre stuff.

 

“A Gest of Robin Hode,†Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren

“Prologue,†Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe

“The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd,â€Sir Walter Raleigh

“The Pasisonate Shepherd to His Love,†Christopher Marlowe

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain

A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt

Adventures of Robin Hood, Roger Lancelyn Green

Anna of Byzantium, Tracy Barrett

Anne of the Thousand Days, Maxwell Anderson

Arabian Nights, Volume I (selections)

Beowulf , John McNamara, translator

Canterbury Tales(selections), Geoffrey Chaucer

Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (selections), Robert H. van Gulik, translator

Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey

Don Quixote (abridged), Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Henry V, William Shakespeare

History of the Kings of Britain (excerpts)

King Lear, William Shakespeare

Le Morte D’Arthur (selections), Thomas Malory

Mabinogion (selections), Charlotte E. Guest, translator

Merry Wives of Windsor, William Shakespeare

Nine Days a Queen, Anne Rinaldi

Richard III, William Shakespeare

Second Booke of the Historie of England, (excerpts), Raphael Holinshed

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Burton Raffel, translator

Tale of Genji (excerpts), Lady Shikibu Murasaki/Arthur Waley, translator

The Koran: Selected Suras, Arthur Jeffrey, translator

The Lion in Winter, James Goldman

[Chris in VA]

Wow! After Jenny, you probably won't even want to look at our lists!:D (the smiley is green for a reason...)

 

I should clarify--we didn't just make our own lists--the first two years, we adapted Omnibus, both adding and subtracting. We used some Cliffs and some Sparknotes, too. In 11th, we used Sonlight 300, but not their discussion questions, just their list (partly, and adapted).

 

Grade 9: 2005-2006

 

Genesis

Exodus

 

Gilgamesh

Hittite Warrior, Joanne Williamson

Cat of Bubastes, G.A. Henty

Greek Myths, D’Aulaire

The Odyssey, Homer

The Iliad, Homer

The Orestia, Aeschylus

Theban Trilogy, Sophocles

The Histories, Herodotus

12 Caesars, Suetonious

Greek and Roman Lives, Plutarch

Ben Hur, Lew Wallace

Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz

Know What You Believe, Paul Little

Know Who You Believe, Paul Little

It Couldn’t Just Happen, L. Richards

 

Grade 10: 2006-2007

 

Martyr of the Catacombs

Church History, Eusebius

Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede+

Confessions, Augustine

Song of Roland

Beowulf

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Once and Future King, T.H. White

Canterbury Tales (Selections), Chaucer

In Freedom’s Cause, G.A. Henty

The NineTailors, Dorothy Sayers

Inferno, Dante

Parcel of Patterns, Jill Paten Walsh

World Religions 101, Bruce Bikel

 

Grade 11: 2007-2008

 

The Scarlet Letter

Heart of Darkness

Metamorphosis

The Jungle

All Quiet on the Western Front

The Great Gatsby

Cheaper By the Dozen

Grapes of Wrath

China’s Long March: 6000 Miles of Danger

Parallel Journeys

The Hiding Place

Alas, Babylon

The Old Man and the Sea

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Cry, the Beloved Country, Paton

Red Scarf Girl

 

Grade 12

 

50 Great Short Stories, ed. Martin Crane

Great Expectations, Dickens

Selections from Sherlock Holmes

Frankenstein

Red Badge

Fall of the House of Usher, Poe (also reading some of his short stories in the ss book above)

Usher 2000, Bradbury (just for fun--makes the point of the usefulness of literacy)

Huckleberry Finn, Twain

Lord of the Flies

Our Town

4 Shakespeare plays:

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Hamlet

MacBeth

Romeo and Juliet

 

We have already done the 50 ss book, and just need to take a week finish them up (no papers, just a few paragraphs and some discussion).

Ds will graduate in December, so I had to shorten the year and take some time in the summer. He won't be writing a lot of papers, but I will assign a few. His history

is mostly covered by his Am. Gov class at CC this fall, but he'll be doing a context page for the books written in the 1800's, as we skipped the 3rd year of the rotation, choosing to

go with interest-led (20th Century) instead of chronological history. As we cover realism and romanticism, we will read the corresponding books.

[Kelly on the prairie]

These are some AMAZING lists!

 

So, how do you "do" these books. Do you discuss them every chapter or two or as a whole? Do you require a pointed paper about each book or about varying elements each book brings to the table of literature? Do you have a very specific list of questions you require your student answer or does it vary by book?

 

I'm trying to get a picture in my mind as to how to implement each book study.

 

Oh, also, how many of you let your student pick their literature list for the year? Do some of you allow them to pick a portion of their readings?

 

questions...questions...questions...

[RebeccaC]

I am doing this for this year, however it is not tied to our history cycle and it is blended with the curriculum called Movies as Lit (ML) I am using guides from

• Teaching the Classics (TC,)
• Progeny Press (PP,)
• Portals in Literature (PL,)
• Novel Units (NU)
• LATITUDES: Resources to Integrate Language Arts and Social Studies Which contain primary docs. (L.)

 

 

Here is our reading list for what it is worth guides I am using with each book will be list as above. The Number is the Lexile number on the book. http://www.lexile.com

 

• Shane (ML) (NU) (L) 870
  
• Bronze Bow (TC) (PP) 760
  
• Huckleberry Finn (TC) (L) 990
  
• At the Back of the North Wind (TC)
  
• To Kill a Mockingbird (ML) (PP) (L) 870
  
• Tom Sawyer (TC) (PP) 950
  
• Johnny Tremain (PP) (L) Latitude guide has this as high school due to the reading of various primary sources from the time period of the book, etc.... 840
  
• Call of the Wild (PP) 1170
   
   
  
• Hamlet (TC) (L) Oxford School text 1390
  
• Henry V (ML) Oxford School text 1390
  
• A Raisin in the Sun (ML)

 

 

Some of these books are not on traditional high school lists or conventional when it comes to WTM, however the guides claim to take them to high school depths as far as analysis goes or the reading of primary sources. This is one reason I have 11 reading selections between books & plays. I also have 11 or so short stories but I am still working on that. This is the first time I am doing this.

 

Some of the levels are chosen because I know that my boys can read these on their own. The Shakespeare plays may be done as popcorn type reading but I am not sure yet since I have them scheduled for May and June next year and by then my boys maybe able to handle them.

 

We will not do every activity in all the guides I have listed with the exception of Movies as Lit and with that guide they will do most of the work. I figured 2 to 4 weeks per book. Bronze Bow and Johnny Termain as 2 weekers (is that a word ;) ) and are scheduled for our first month of school. They are my get your feet wet books for both me and my boys :D Most of the books are scheduled for 3 weeks.

 

When a book is paired with a movie the paper will be a contrast the book and the movie. Movies as Lit has all the info on how to do that and a way to grade the paper. Other wise we will go with essay ideas from the various lit guides.

 

There are other movies that will be worked on between books using Movies as Lit. This reading list is half of our Lit course. I have other grammar and writing programs we will use to round out our language arts credit.

 

 

Hope this helps.

[Kelly on the prairie]

Thank you all! I copied off this post to use in deciding what to do. You gave me a great stepping off point.

 

Rebecca C.- I want to be your kid. How and what you are teaching sounds very engaging, thought provoking and sensible. I would love to hear what you are using to round out your ninth grade year in the way of language arts.

 

I have thought several times about getting the book Movies as Literature as we are all a bunch of movie buffs here in this house. Also, time and again,the kids have been disappointed in the movies after reading the books which, in my way of thinking instills, solidifies their love of reading.

[RebeccaC]

Thank you all! I copied off this post to use in deciding what to do. You gave me a great stepping off point.

 

Rebecca C.- I want to be your kid. How and what you are teaching sounds very engaging, thought provoking and sensible. I would love to hear what you are using to round out your ninth grade year in the way of language arts.

 

I have thought several times about getting the book Movies as Literature as we are all a bunch of movie buffs here in this house. Also, time and again,the kids have been disappointed in the movies after reading the books which, in my way of thinking instills, solidifies their love of reading.

 

Well, our hs is heavy on language arts this year for many reasons. We are using

• Sentence Composing for Middle School:
• Grammar for Middle School: A Sentence-Composing
• a website for grammar review http://www.EnglishGrammar101.com
• going to order in Aug Thinking Through Grammar sophomore from http://www.drwhimbey.com/sophomore.html which is another sentence writing approach to grammar
• sequential spelling

 

 

You know that you can buy sample lessons from Movies as lit for $5. each off of the authors website, http://www.designastudy.com/products/1891975099.html# scroll down they are at the bottom of the page.

 

• Arsenic & Old Lace
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

• To Kill A Mockingbird

 

 

My boys are a bit behind in writing due to some LD issues. That is why there is so much emphasis on sentence writing and grammar being learned through sentence writing.

 

Dh has several family members who work in the entertainment industry as actors or producers or..... His step brother is a producer and most of dh's family thinks our older son should go into the business. There has been some real interest in my son's story lines by bil and some folks he knows and so bil thinks ds could/should become a type of produce who just comes up with story lines. Thinks he has profound talent in that area. That is why we are doing Movies as lit. Dh wants to put together a class for ds on language of film and Movies as lit is meant to pave the way for that. Ds wants to be a pastor and writer of children's books and I am more incline to back what ds wants but ...........

 

Anyway I hope this works out like I posted I have not done this before and I am not comfortable just doing Movies as Lit. Ms. Stout the author of Movies as Lit has extension ideas for each film and that is often read the book and then write a compare and contrast paper. We are reading some of the books with out guides like the book that the Quite Man was taken from which is a collection of short stories. There is no study guide for that book so I will just assign it to be read. The book is called The Quite Man and other Stories or the title before the movie Green Rushes by Maurice Walsh. There are a couple of other books and bios that are extention books that will not have study guides and that I am just assigning to be read also. Some of these might be done as family read alouds I am not sure yet since I don't know all of the reading levels of these books.

 

I will have a 9th and 10th grader doing this this year. My 9th grader is more of a math science kid and is not real thrilled but knows that he needs to expand his horizon with some "artsy stuff" as he put it :rolleyes: My 10th grader on the other hand can't wait to start.

 

Where are you in IL?

[Jenny in Florida]

So, how do you "do" these books. Do you discuss them every chapter or two or as a whole? Do you require a pointed paper about each book or about varying elements each book brings to the table of literature? Do you have a very specific list of questions you require your student answer or does it vary by book?

 

I'm trying to get a picture in my mind as to how to implement each book study.

 

Oh, also, how many of you let your student pick their literature list for the year? Do some of you allow them to pick a portion of their readings?

 

 

What we would do was to discuss the books as she read them. So, she'd go off and read for a while, then come back and tell me what she read. I'd ask questions or ask for her opinion about what she'd read. Very informal. No specific list of questions. English is my background, so I felt pretty comfortable winging it.

 

Then, as I said in my other posts, she had to write essays about a certain number of the books each year. Generally, she had pretty free rein when it came to deciding what she was going to write about. All I did was set certain guidelines about how long the essay should be or what components it had to have. For example, there was one year when I required that every essay include a synopsis of the book or books she discussed.

 

Although I always did most of the selecting, I did discuss the possible choices with her when I was planning for the year. If there were sometimes two or three possibilities that would all fit the same niche, I'd ask her to read a little about each one and choose. When we needed something in translation, I'd pretty much always take her to the bookstore with me and let her pick the edition she liked best. It was always a pretty cooperative venture with her.

[Irishmommy]

When I taught 9th grade in ps we taught about 8 novels a year. That was plenty with a major paper each six weeks. Oh, and we also did a unit on short stories.

 

Maybe that will give you a jumping off point. I would suggest that in 9th grade you have them read all of the Illiad or the Odyssey. I think it is important to read the entire work, not just parts of it. ;)

 

Hope that helps in some way.

[emubird]

When I took AP English we read:

 

Tom Jones

Wuthering Heights

Invisible Man

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Waiting for Godot

King Lear

As You Like It

a few poems that I can't remember

a few short stories (not that many)

 

That was a full year course. We wrote a 1-2 page paper on most things we read, but not all.

 

I also took a full year American Lit course:

The Scarlet Letter

Huckleberry Finn

Sister Carrie

Our Town

Babbitt

selections from Walden

 

We wrote a paper on each thing we read for that course.

 

So that gives you an idea as to what AP/honors courses might read in one year. It's not that much. You could do a full year course that only reads 6 things and call it a full course. (These days, I'm hearing from ps kids that a full year course might only be 4 books and 4 papers -- although I would imagine they're reading some other things like poems and plays and short stories.)

 

Whether you would want to do that is another question.

 

When I made a transcript up for my daughter to apply to college, I was listing about 6 books for a semester course. I thought that was maybe on the high end. She'd probably read a lot more than that, but she hadn't written papers on all everything. (And I'm not sure that writing papers on each and every book is really necessary, as long as there's discussion on the book.)