High School Lit - Old Scott Foresman Texts, etc.

[bibsandmegs]

I've been reading through all the old posts about the Scott Foresman literature textbooks - Patterns in Literature, Traditions in Literature, United States in Literature, England in Literature, etc. They seem very interesting and are somewhat still available.

 

Has anyone ever used these that's still on this board? Or anyone even familiar with them?

 

My biggest question is does the student read an entire work, (i.e., The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, etc.)? I'd really like to do some literature with my youngest two like the literature I did in school. However, I'm a little concerned about my ability to get all the books read and have complete literary understanding of them. So, I'm looking for something that can provide some guidance in this area along with a small amount of comprehension questions for the kids, just to make sure they actually read.

 

Does anyone have any suggestions? If I don't hear more about the Scott Foresman stuff, I'm leaning towards Lightning Lit for high school, but I'm not sold on it.

 

I'd sure appreciate any suggestions. Thank you so much!

 

Lisa

[quark]

I've been reading through all the old posts about the Scott Foresman literature textbooks - Patterns in Literature, Traditions in Literature, United States in Literature, England in Literature, etc. They seem very interesting and are somewhat still available.

 

Has anyone ever used these that's still on this board? Or anyone even familiar with them?

 

My biggest question is does the student read an entire work, (i.e., The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, etc.)? I'd really like to do some literature with my youngest two like the literature I did in school. However, I'm a little concerned about my ability to get all the books read and have complete literary understanding of them. So, I'm looking for something that can provide some guidance in this area along with a small amount of comprehension questions for the kids, just to make sure they actually read.

 

Does anyone have any suggestions? If I don't hear more about the Scott Foresman stuff, I'm leaning towards Lightning Lit for high school, but I'm not sold on it.

 

I'd sure appreciate any suggestions. Thank you so much!

 

Lisa

 

A lot of our "homeschooled" humanities were unschooled (and why DS also took community college classes for accountability). We did use Patterns and Traditions (we had US and England too but did not use them as much). However, they were not really assigned. We just did them when we could get to them for my own peace of mind or if DS felt like picking them up.

 

The longer selections are all abridged as far as I know. Our favorites were the shorter plays, short stories, poems and drama extracts. There are a lot of comprehension and discussion type questions that would have been more useful when DS was younger I think (he has very advanced reading comprehension skills). I do wish we'd started with the high school books when he was younger. We might have used them as actual curriculum then. The writing ideas are good in my opinion but my DS is not as advanced in writing so these helped in that respect. I would have tweaked the prompts gradually to be more difficult/ deep if we had used them as our core curriculum.

 

FWIW, I would not have been comfortable assigning a whole credit to one book unless the student covered everything as well as read whole books vs abridged extracts and researched deeply for the essays. I did not even mention these books in our course descriptions due to the unschooly way we used them. But as supplements, and for reading for pleasure in the car, they were a good bargain.

 

It would depend a lot on the kid. Mine loves literature so we would definitely have done more than these books had we taken this route for core lit curriculum. If it's just something to get done/ check a box, these books might be a good choice.

 

Edited February 12, 2017 by quark