AP English Lit at home

[BakersDozen]

Is there anyone else doing this course at home this coming year? Have you found a syllabus you can recommend? I've found a few on-line but nothing really jumps out at me.

On-line classes are not an option ($$$).

[kokotg]

I did it at home a couple of years ago and will again not this coming year but the next year. AP lit is one that I didn't feel like I needed to really follow an AP syllabus...we mostly just did literature and added in some AP prep stuff, and it went well (he got a 5). But English is the subject I'm most comfortable with (I put in 3 years towards an English phD before I had kids and taught several semesters of freshman comp in grad school), so I don't know how much that had to do with it. I certainly didn't feel the same confidence about the history classes we've done. But, yeah, I just kind of taught what I wanted to teach, put a big emphasis on poetry and on close reading in general, and he did a bunch of practice essays (sometimes timed; sometimes I'd use the prompts for longer, untimed essays, too), and he went through a test prep book before the exam. Oh, one really helpful thing is making sure they have a couple of works that they know very, very well that have broad and complex enough themes that they can plan to use one of them on the open choice essay (I'm blanking on what it's called right now). Hamlet works with just about any prompt 🙂 DS ended up writing about Invisible Man on that one, though, which he had read recently. 

[domesticidyll]

So true about Hamlet! The year my kitchen table English class read Hamlet, we went through a bunch of old test questions, and it worked for all of them! I think Romeo and Juliet and Huck Finn are pretty good, too.

The AP English Youtube playlist from this past spring might also be a helpful watch in preparing for the exam; lots of good information about what readers are looking for.