Apologia American Literature

[Nam2001]

Any reviews on this? 

[Lori D.]

Here's the Cathy Duffy review.

_______________________________

No personal experience -- just an assessment from the sample pages, and in looking at it through the eyes of teaching high school lit. & writing to homeschool co-op classes, and from having gone "DIY" with our own Lit. when we were homeschooling high school...

Just from looking at the table of contents and sample pages -- it covers the usual or "standard" authors/works, plus some nice choices of additional authors. It goes up through the 1960s (a lot of other programs stop by the 1930s-1950s). I can't tell if it just covers excerpts of longer works, or if it covers the entire work. I favor covering complete works in most cases when it is a novel, novella, or play. (Again, just me, but I am fine with excerpts for nonfiction works.)

As far as the overall literature selection... I personally would have preferred to see fewer nonfiction excerpts (speeches, journal entries, essays, autobiography) -- although that is largely what we have from Colonial times -- and instead seen more contemporary works -- or at least works from the last half the 20th century. BUT... nobody seems to do that, so I won't count that against the program. 😉 

For my homeschool co-op Lit. & Writing co-op classes, I provide a good amount of background info about the author/work/times, and a lot of teaching info on literary elements and literature topics, so that would be important to me to have in a program. In the Apologia American Lit., there's too little of the teaching text in the sample pages to get a feel for how good/poor or how detailed/superficial the background info and explanations are. What little teaching text I could see in the sample text was very Christian-based. Even though I am a Christian, I personally prefer providing broader perspective to my classes and allow my students to see and discuss not only Christian themes/worldview, but other themes and worldview as well. For homeschooling our own DSs, I usually used 2 or more resources for each work we covered, so that we could have multiple perspectives about an author/work/the times.

 The questions in the first half of the student notebook seem much more comprehension-based. The questions in the second half starts to include some discussion-based or beginning literary analysis types of questions. It looks like if the student is a "workbook style learner" and has a basic understanding of literary analysis and how to "dig into" a work (i.e. think about discussion questions and write supported paragraphs or essays in response), this program could be done largely solo by the student.

It looks like it covers enough literature and I would *guess* it has enough thinking/writing in it to count as a full credit of English. From what I could see, it looks very typical -- not "lite" and not "rigorous".

Edited October 18, 2020 by Lori D.

[Junie]

We are using this for the first time with dd16.  I paired it up with Notgrass American History and it seems to be working well.

I have a degree in English education; up until now we have completely DIY'ed high school English.  I realized with my first two that my kids do not like discussing literature and they were not really happy with my writing assignments.  I didn't push hard and I kind of regret that.

I saw the Apologia American Lit on sale at Christianbook (it's still on sale because I think it's discontinued).  For 75 percent off (!) I figured it was worth taking a look at.  If you go to Christianbook's site, you can see the Table of Contents and some excerpts.

There are some whole works that are listed in the Table of Contents that are not included in the textbook.  There are discussion questions for these works in the notebook.  So, these few works will need to be purchased separately to use the full curriculum: Huck Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Raisin in the Sun.

I really like it.  Dd16 doesn't like answering all of the questions, but that's exactly why I bought it -- to force to her think a little bit about what she's reading.

Please let me know if you have any questions and I'll try to answer them. :)

 

[Nam2001]

39 minutes ago, Junie said:

We are using this for the first time with dd16.  I paired it up with Notgrass American History and it seems to be working well.

I have a degree in English education; up until now we have completely DIY'ed high school English.  I realized with my first two that my kids do not like discussing literature and they were not really happy with my writing assignments.  I didn't push hard and I kind of regret that.

I saw the Apologia American Lit on sale at Christianbook (it's still on sale because I think it's discontinued).  For 75 percent off (!) I figured it was worth taking a look at.  If you go to Christianbook's site, you can see the Table of Contents and some excerpts.

There are some whole works that are listed in the Table of Contents that are not included in the textbook.  There are discussion questions for these works in the notebook.  So, these few works will need to be purchased separately to use the full curriculum: Huck Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Raisin in the Sun.

I really like it.  Dd16 doesn't like answering all of the questions, but that's exactly why I bought it -- to force to her think a little bit about what she's reading.

Please let me know if you have any questions and I'll try to answer them. 🙂

 

Thanks! I actually saw that at Christian Book! Here’s a question- is there an answer key for the student notebook? I only see the notebook and text and don’t see that there are answers in the back. 

[Junie]

16 minutes ago, Nam2001 said:

Thanks! I actually saw that at Christian Book! Here’s a question- is there an answer key for the student notebook? I only see the notebook and text and don’t see that there are answers in the back. 

I actually didn't know that there was an answer key until I looked at the link that LoriD. listed.  Apologia has course websites for all of their textbooks.  You can access this course from Apologia's website with a code that is listed in the notebook.

[kbutton]

On 10/18/2020 at 9:14 PM, Junie said:

We are using this for the first time with dd16.  I paired it up with Notgrass American History and it seems to be working well.

I have a degree in English education; up until now we have completely DIY'ed high school English.  I realized with my first two that my kids do not like discussing literature and they were not really happy with my writing assignments.  I didn't push hard and I kind of regret that.

I saw the Apologia American Lit on sale at Christianbook (it's still on sale because I think it's discontinued).  For 75 percent off (!) I figured it was worth taking a look at.  If you go to Christianbook's site, you can see the Table of Contents and some excerpts.

This is exactly what we are doing too (including Notgrass American History), and the sale is how I ended up with this set, though I have looked at it multiple times. We are not doing the Notgrass novels, but my son is reading most of their literary selections in the American Voices part of the course (I think that's what it's called). [By the way, have you located all of the stories that are not included in the text? I am wondering if I should try, or if I should skip that and do something else.]

FWIW, my son, who is 2e (ASD, ADHD, expressive language disorder) is enjoying it pretty well in spite of the fact that American Literature is kind of dismal. We might leave out some works and look for a couple of more contemporary things to include. I am considering doing a unit on The Crucible and watching a docudrama about the witch trials. It's going really well. My son has had a lot of well-structured tutoring and language work to get to where he could do this curriculum, but I am very happy with how it's going.

I agree that it's not overly easy or super rigorous, which is what we needed. My son is just this year able to answer structured questions like the essay questions on the test. Right now he's doing them with his tutor, but he needs less help with each essay.