Someone mentioned a book to use... (RE "doing" high school literature without a curriculum)

[AimeeM]

Was it Figuratively Speaking, maybe? 

This year we want to concentrate most of our English work on building DD14's writing skills, since that's really her weakest area (dyslexic; she's working CAP's Writing & Rhetoric, book 3, right now).

I have the literature LIST we want to work through:

 

A Christmas Carol

Fahrenheit 451

1984

Stories & Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The Gift of the Magi

Hamlet (with "No Fear Shakespeare" - we're going to see this on stage later in the school year)

 

And now I'd like to buy a book for *my* reference ;)

[TrixieB]

Could it be The Reader's Odyssey: An Individualized Literature Program for Homeschooling Middle and High School Students by Dena Luchsinger?

 

 

[Chrysalis Academy]

In her high school lectures, SWB suggests this book, Essential Literary Terms:

 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393928373/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_S_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=2DA53TKIL7ENA&coliid=I2J3IMZML4ITSF

 

Figuratively Speaking is good, but more of a middle school level than a high school level treatment.

 

Is this what you are looking for? A book to help you understand and discuss the elements of literature that one would write about in a literary essay?  

[AimeeM]

Yes! I need a book that will help me, help her, discuss literature... and what will EVENTUALLY be needed to write a literary essay/analysis. We aren't there yet (writing about literature - she's still learning to enjoy literature outside of her comfort/interest zone).

[Chrysalis Academy]

You might really enjoy SWB's Literary Analysis lecture if you haven't listened to it. She makes it sound easy and doable! And lists a couple of resources, including the one I linked.

 

http://peacehillpress.com/index.php?p=product&id=126

[Lori D.]

Teaching the Classics

How to Read Literature Like A Professor

The Reader's Odyssey

Reading Strands

 

Windows to the World -- program with a *great* unit on how to write a literary analysis essay

(gr. 9-12) 1 semester program. Can add the Jill Pike syllabus to be a full-year program. Focus is on six short stories (including "Gift of the Magi" from your list). Teaches annotation, how to use those annotations as supporting examples in a literary analysis essay, how to write a literary analysis essay, and how 8-10 of the major literary elements work in literature.

 

Guides to individual works can be very helpful to spring-boarding discussion, pointing out literary elements and guiding analysis, and for suggested writing assignment ideas. Here are some guide ideas for your lit. list:

 

A Christmas Carol

Sparknotes (free guide) 

Portals to Literature (guide on CD)

 

Fahrenheit 451

Sparknotes (free guide)

Teacher Web (free guide)

list of literary quotations and allusions -- and what they are referencing (free)

 

1984

Penguin (free guide)

 

Stories & Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children

Lightning Lit. 7 and 8 have units that cover some of the poems and short stories; LL8 also covers A Christmas Carol, and one of the two has Ransom of Red Chief, another O. Henry short story in it (he's the author of Gift of the Magi). LL8 is a nice gentle guided intro into literature and literary analysis, and can be used with a 9th grader who is just starting to "do" Literature (I used it in 9th with one of my DSs).

 

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Core Knowledge -- extensive background info and guide to several stories (free)

 

The Gift of the Magi

Cummings (free guide)

Essential Short Stories (free guide)

 

Hamlet 

Glencoe Literature Library (free guide)

Penguin (free guide)

Brightest Heaven of Invention: Christian Guide to Six Shakespeare Plays (by Leithart)

Parallel Shakespeare materials

since you're using "No Fear Shakespeare" (NFS), you could get just the teacher guide  (there's also a book of side-by-side original text and the modern translation, but that is pretty much what NFS is)

 

 

Totally unsolicited comment coming up here, so ignore as desired ;) :laugh: : This is a little bit of an unusual 9th grade lit. list for 2 reasons:

 

1. Your 9th grade Lit. list is a bit light (1 play, 2 short stories, 2 novellas, 1 novel, and unspecified # of works from a poetry/short story anthology); I personally would probably add 2-3 novels to this list for a solid amount of high school work; but that's just me! :) And, you may be doing an online Lit. class or a co-op, or you may be doing some other Lit. tied to History that is not mentioned here… A thought: perhaps consider saving Sleepy Hollow and works from the anthology for a future year, and do Windows to the World (an in-depth study of 6 short stories, including Gift of the Magi) and the other longer works on your list for your lit…?

 

2. 1984 is more typically done in late high school because it is a more mature work and psychologically intense. It also tends to work best in conjunction with (or after) a student has studied 20th century history and government types (i.e., totalitarian governments and their forms of controlling a population through distraction/redirection, limiting information, propaganda, fear, and citizens informing on one another). If you have a young or sensitive student you might want to wait on this one; it is not just another Hunger Games type of dystopia… JMO! :)

[AimeeM]

Thanks guys!

I'm really leaning towards something that is purely discussion based - which is why I didn't go with something like Lightning Lit :) 

She'll be doing some history and science reading as well, and we do not need, or want, to overwhelm her.

To be frank, I'm not even sure that I'm comfortable calling this 9th grade for her. I mean, that's what it says on paper, as per state law, but we were flirting with the idea of keeping her back a year, so she may do an "extra year" of high school.

[RootAnn]

My dd's Freshman year lit will be light(er) because her online WTM writing class (the catch-up class before Rhetoric) is rumored to be brutal in terms of hours spent writing. Writing is definitely dd#1's bugaboo. She's doing five novels (three selected from Excellence in Literature's modules from American Lit), selections from five poets, a couple of speeches, and some short stories.

 

I think the reason Aimee went with shorter & less works was because her dd is dyslexic, so reading is harder & more time-consuming. My dd is a strong reader and the reading itself won't tax her at all. She'll look on it as a break from everything else. The fact that I'm requiring some occasional light writing alongside the literature is what she'll complain about. If absolutely everything was discussion-based, she'd be thrilled.  :lol:

 

Our local high school, definitely not an academic powerhouse (unless you ask them, in which case they are in the Top 10 in the state!), only has their freshman class read one or two novels and a couple of poems because it is a writing testing year. So, they concentrate almost entirely on writing-to-the-test to the exclusion of just about everything else. I'm not letting my dd, who needs to spend a lot of time on her writing this year, off the hook that easily. (FWIW, I decided to not do Windows to the World yet even though I have it on hand. I tried the Elegant Essay by the same author and it wasn't to my taste. Maybe someday IEW will redo it to make it more user-friendly for some of us.)

 

Aimee - I think listening to SWB's Literary Analysis talk is a great start. Make sure you print out the notes that go with it as it helps to have that in front of you while you are listening. (Or, at least it was helpful to me!)  Good luck!  :hat:

[AimeeM]

Absolutely. If I required any more in terms of reading, on top of her very heavy writing load, she would wilt. In fact, those two things (literature and writing) would take up her entire school day because she would be so exhausted. The act of writing is physically taxing for her, then you add in editing (spelling is a HUGE "bugaboo" - lol - for her!) and formatting, and she just wouldn't be able to handle it. She is finally regaining her confidence and I'm not going to kill that (this year).

Most of our local high schools seem to do a bit of a lighter year in the 9th grade. They refer to it as "Freshman Academy" - the children are getting used to a high school work-load, their new roles in their own learning, and greater expectations. 

Regardless, as I said previously, I'm not sold on this being a high school year for DD. Or, rather, I'm not sold on that this is "one of the four" - it may be "one of the five" ;)

My dd's Freshman year lit will be light(er) because her online WTM writing class (the catch-up class before Rhetoric) is rumored to be brutal in terms of hours spent writing. Writing is definitely dd#1's bugaboo. She's doing five novels (three selected from Excellence in Literature's modules from American Lit), selections from five poets, a couple of speeches, and some short stories.

 

I think the reason Aimee went with shorter & less works was because her dd is dyslexic, so reading is harder & more time-consuming. My dd is a strong reader and the reading itself won't tax her at all. She'll look on it as a break from everything else. The fact that I'm requiring some occasional light writing alongside the literature is what she'll complain about. If absolutely everything was discussion-based, she'd be thrilled.  :lol:

 

Our local high school, definitely not an academic powerhouse (unless you ask them, in which case they are in the Top 10 in the state!), only has their freshman class read one or two novels and a couple of poems because it is a writing testing year. So, they concentrate almost entirely on writing-to-the-test to the exclusion of just about everything else. I'm not letting my dd, who needs to spend a lot of time on her writing this year, off the hook that easily. (FWIW, I decided to not do Windows to the World yet even though I have it on hand. I tried the Elegant Essay by the same author and it wasn't to my taste. Maybe someday IEW will redo it to make it more user-friendly for some of us.)

 

Aimee - I think listening to SWB's Literary Analysis talk is a great start. Make sure you print out the notes that go with it as it helps to have that in front of you while you are listening. (Or, at least it was helpful to me!)  Good luck!  :hat:

 

[Lori D.]

I think the reason Aimee went with shorter & less works was because her dd is dyslexic, so reading is harder & more time-consuming

 

Absolutely. If I required any more in terms of reading, on top of her very heavy writing load, she would wilt. In fact, those two things (literature and writing) would take up her entire school day because she would be so exhausted. The act of writing is physically taxing for her, then you add in editing (spelling is a HUGE "bugaboo" - lol - for her!) and formatting, and she just wouldn't be able to handle it. 

 

Totally understand. Our DS#2 has stealth dyslexia and mild LDs (esp. with writing, spelling and math), and we did a majority of our Lit. together, doing the reading aloud together (you could also use audiobooks), and then discussing / analyzing in the midst of reading, which condenses time and takes a big amount of busywork writing out of the equation. :) So literature programs and lit. guides can still be quite useful -- just adapt around the student's need -- read aloud the teaching info, and do a lot of the answers orally (at least, that's what worked for us).

 

For writing, we went with baby steps; we did 2 20-minute sessions in a day, and it was all he could handle. At the 8th-9th grade ages he was *just* finally starting to be able to do a little bit of writing, but couldn't handle too much at a time, so we broke the process up over 2 weeks into small bites to keep from overwhelming DS in order to produce a finished 5-paragraph essay, and I was still heavily a part of the process for helping with brainstorming and organizing/outline, and then editing. 

 

re: short Lit. list

One thought: it's nice to have an extra novel or two at the end of your list, just in case you move through things at a quicker pace than anticipated. Then you're prepared and not scrambling to figure out what you'd like to cover and what will you use to cover it. And if you don't get to it, it's okay -- you can save for another year or another student.

 

Just to give you an idea on time: doing the literature aloud, we averaged about 5-8 weeks on a novel, 2-3 weeks on a novellas and plays, 3-4 weeks on Shakespeare plays, and 2-3 days for short stories, and 2-3days on a poet. If you're just watching a play (and not reading it), even with a guide and oral work, that's going to take just a few days, maybe a week. :)

 

 

Just some ideas for alternatives to having the student do all the reading solo, and for doing a lot of discussion and analysis orally rather than on paper via writing. :) Having a student with LDs caused me to super streamline everything, and make sure absolutely any time writing was involved to *make it count* and double dip whenever and however possible. ;)

 

And as always, YOU know your student best, to know what she can handle. :) And ALWAYS -- focusing on a small amount of high quality is much better than trying to do lots of quantity when it comes to deep learning with lit. and writing. :)

 

BEST of luck, whether this is 8th or 9th grade! Warmest regards, Lori D.

[MomatHWTK]

Very helpful informatin in this post- thanks.  I too have a reluctant reader.  I've started him with War of the Worlds to try to get an interest going.  ;) 

[Chrysalis Academy]

My dd just finished War of the Worlds. She really liked it.  There are a couple of movie versions, and that can lead into a whole exploration of early space-invasion sci-fi - check out Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers and the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movies, compare and contrast the War of the Worlds book, movies (several versions) and modern alien-invasion movies like Independence Day. Listen to the Orson Welles radio performance of WoTW and talk about how media has changed - and not - in the last 100 years.  There is so much you can do with a story like that! And it doesn't all have to involve reading to involve a lot of analysis, critical and comparative thinking, etc.  I think there is a lot of space for analysis and comparison of films and stories that would be great for kids with reading and writing challenges. It doesn't have to involve reading lengthy tomes in order to be a good exercise in analysis and higher-level thinking.

[AimeeM]

As always, you're completely right. Looking at your time-table, we definitely have time for another novel (or two, lol).

 

And another poster mentioned something that I forgot - DD has been itching to do HG Wells. She can't handle it on her own, but she wants me to help her with one or two of the books (and she has all of them). 

 

 

 

Totally understand. Our DS#2 has stealth dyslexia and mild LDs (esp. with writing, spelling and math), and we did a majority of our Lit. together, doing the reading aloud together (you could also use audiobooks), and then discussing / analyzing in the midst of reading, which condenses time and takes a big amount of busywork writing out of the equation. :) So literature programs and lit. guides can still be quite useful -- just adapt around the student's need -- read aloud the teaching info, and do a lot of the answers orally (at least, that's what worked for us).

 

For writing, we went with baby steps; we did 2 20-minute sessions in a day, and it was all he could handle. At the 8th-9th grade ages he was *just* finally starting to be able to do a little bit of writing, but couldn't handle too much at a time, so we broke the process up over 2 weeks into small bites to keep from overwhelming DS in order to produce a finished 5-paragraph essay, and I was still heavily a part of the process for helping with brainstorming and organizing/outline, and then editing. 

 

re: short Lit. list

One thought: it's nice to have an extra novel or two at the end of your list, just in case you move through things at a quicker pace than anticipated. Then you're prepared and not scrambling to figure out what you'd like to cover and what will you use to cover it. And if you don't get to it, it's okay -- you can save for another year or another student.

 

Just to give you an idea on time: doing the literature aloud, we averaged about 5-8 weeks on a novel, 2-3 weeks on a novellas and plays, 3-4 weeks on Shakespeare plays, and 2-3 days for short stories, and 2-3days on a poet. If you're just watching a play (and not reading it), even with a guide and oral work, that's going to take just a few days, maybe a week. :)

 

 

Just some ideas for alternatives to having the student do all the reading solo, and for doing a lot of discussion and analysis orally rather than on paper via writing. :) Having a student with LDs caused me to super streamline everything, and make sure absolutely any time writing was involved to *make it count* and double dip whenever and however possible. ;)

 

And as always, YOU know your student best, to know what she can handle. :) And ALWAYS -- focusing on a small amount of high quality is much better than trying to do lots of quantity when it comes to deep learning with lit. and writing. :)

 

BEST of luck, whether this is 8th or 9th grade! Warmest regards, Lori D.

 

 

[Lori D.]

As always, you're completely right. Looking at your time-table, we definitely have time for another novel (or two, lol).

 

Really, it's okay however much you get through. Your time table will be unique to your family. I just threw that out there for a VERY general idea of what time might look like when doing virtually all of the lit. out loud.   :) With the other reading, for History, Science, etc., your list may be perfect for DD.

 

 

And another poster mentioned something that I forgot - DD has been itching to do HG Wells. She can't handle it on her own, but she wants me to help her with one or two of the books (and she has all of them). 

 

Adding a Wells story is very do-able! :) I vote for "The Invisible Man". It's short, some interesting moral/ethical discussion, and not difficult to follow, even while written in Victorian language.

 

We just did "The Time Machine" in my gr. 7-12 Lit. & Comp. class last year, I think parts of it dragged for the students. Still, some interesting discussions about socialism, evolution, and the concept of time travel.

 

Parts of "War of the World" drag to *me*, but if you're doing all the cool things Chrysalis Academy suggests, that would really perk up that one. A good fluff go-along book is When the Tripods Came (Christopher), and sequels -- a recent teen "popcorn" series of books based on what if the War of the World aliens did NOT die off as they do in the book, but enslave humans… :)

 

Here are some free audio book versions from LibriVox:

Time Machine (version 1)

Time Machine (version 2)

Time Machine (version 3)

Time Machine (version 4)

 

Invisible Man (version 1)

Invisible Man (version 2)

 

War of the Worlds (version 1)

War of the Worlds (version 2)

 

Island of Dr. Moreau (version 1)

Island of Dr. Moreau (version 2)

 

You might also enjoy Wells' short story The Country of the Blind.

 

 

And enjoy a movie version of a Wells story, too:

- The Invisible Man (1933)

- War of the Worlds (1953) and (2005)

- Island of Lost Souls (1932) -- early film version of Island of Dr. Moreau

- Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) -- intense, so PREVIEW FIRST

- The Time Machine (1960) and (2002)

(and other time travel movies for a young teen: Time Bandits, Time After Time, Back to the Future IlI (#I and #II of that series have a LOT of language, and #I has a scene with the threat of r*pe that really bothers me)

 

[Chrysalis Academy]

I agree with Lori that The Invisible Man is the best first Wells.  I like WotW second best, and I agree that Time Machine drags.  And is creepy.  As is Dr. Moreau, I love all the movie links! My girls are film and theater buffs, so adding a film version of the books they read works really well for us, and helps them develop observation and critical thinking skills, and it's a great first, easy, compare-and-contrast topic.

 

FYI, dd read Invisible Man as a 7th grader. She just finished WotW in the beginning of 8th, and she commented early on that she didn't think she would have been able to read it as easily earlier. She felt good that she was able to tackle a more challenging (to her, meaning older syntax/vocab and writing style) book but I think it was good that it wasn't a super long book.  My dd is a voracious reader and doesn't have  any LDs that make reading hard, but she hasn't really made the transition into reading older/harder books and I'm trying to gently lead her in that direction without pushing too hard.  I've found that short stories/novellas/short novels are proving a better gateway to the longer classics.  Wells, Poe, Hawthorne, Stevenson all have short stories or novellas that are engaging and good for this.  Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde was a good choice for us in 7th.