Can someone compare LL and EIL for me?

[thowell]

Dd16 is doing Funda Funda schedule for American History next year. I am wanting her to do American Lit as well. So which program do you like better? Pros and cons of each?

 

Lighting Literature American Lit  both guides

 

EIL American Lit

[Faithr]

I don't know what Funda Funda is???  And I've never heard of EIL American LIt but I did use Lightning Lit with my oldest kids for American Literature.  This was a while ago as they are all 21 to 25 now.  But we liked the LL guides a lot.  I didn't use the whole program as I recall and I added on some other books at the end that weren't used by LL.

 

From the Early to Mid Am. Lit we read:

Autobiography of Ben Franklin

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

The Scarlet Letter

 

From the Mid to Late guide:

The Adventures of Huck Finn

The Red Badge of Courage

We read some Longfellow

 

I can't remember if the guides also provide for short stories and more poetry.  I remember that we read Ann Bradstreet and we read a short story by Melville instead of Moby Dick but for life of me I can't remember which short story.  I don't think it was Billy Budd.

 

I had the kids write an essay on any book of their choosing - tying it in with what they were learning in history.  I remember my oldest decided to revisit Little Women, my oldest son wrote about the short story The Devil and Dan'l Webster.  I think my now 21 yo wrote about Call of the Wild which I had made optional but you know he might have chosen a short story by London instead.  Isn't it awful I can remember????  LOL.

 

Then I added in some books at the end of the year to bring us into the 20th century.  We read My Antonia by Willa Cather and The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald to finish up the year.  I think I just found free study guides for those.

 

HTH

[Summer123]

EIL is Excellence in Literature by Janice Campbell.  We are also thinking about doing this.  The set is comprised of 5 books that start in 8th grade and goes through 12th.  It includes Literature and Writing.  IEW uses the last 4 books as suggestions on their website.    I'm really torn about using this or going with a history based literature program.  I love all the book choices with EIL though.

[Mom22ns]

I can't really compare them because I didn't use LL for high school. I did use LL for 7th & 8th, then switched to EIL for high school. 

 

The things we like about EIL: Book selection, price, independence, and quality of assignments (I really disliked the quality of the assignments in LL). My two favorites were Intro to Lit and American Lit. I really don't think you can beat EIL for the price and I really wanted nothing else that a higher price would have bought. 

 

The one thing I think is different, in LL (in lower levels) there were a lot of comprehension questions for each book. I'm not a fan of comprehension questions. I think you show comprehension by writing about the book, not by answering trivia questions. However, if you are a person who doesn't read the books your kids read but wants to be able to discuss or have some questions provided to make sure your kids are reading the books, LL has them and EIL doesn't. For me that was a reason to buy EIL, but for others it would make LL a better fit. 

 

If you have any specific questions about EIL, I'd be glad to answer, although you might do a search, I respond to questions about it frequently. :)

 

Edited June 28, 2016 by Momto2Ns