American Historical Literature

Get complete lesson plans, schedule and teaching notes for the entire year. Package includes the Level 130 American Historical Literature Parent Guide and accompanying American Historical Literature Student Guide. Package also includes all of the American Historical Literature books, as well as Dating with Integrity, scheduled in these guides.

Overview of the Literature

Instructor's Guides

Your Literature 130 Instructor's Guides (IG) weaves all your materials into one exciting and cohesive program. Starting in this upper-level program, you receive both a Literature and Language Arts Parent Guide and a separate Student Guide.

The Parent Guide mirrors the Student Guide, but also includes answers, provides extra notes and allows you to check their progress and discuss their reading. This format allows you to be as engaged or as hands-off as you and your students like.

American Historical Literature

Sonlight's 130 Literature moves roughly chronologically through American History. The books are in a variety of genres, including lyric poetry, short story, novella, novel, memoir, science fiction, historical fiction, and travelogue. There is a novel told in vignettes, a novel told from multiple points of view, an epistolary novel, and a novel-in-verse.

The setting of the books is also varied across the United States: Alaska, California, Idaho, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Michigan, Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. Also a covered wagon trip from Arkansas to Oregon, and a car road trip from Chicago to Texas.

You'll read a book about each of our North American neighbors: Elijah of Buxton takes place in Canada and My Heart Lies South takes place in Mexico.

The male and female authors are Caucasian, Africian-American, Abenaki, and Korean-American.

The Literature includes several mature works. The poetry book, for example, contains collections by six of America's top poets, including Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, and Sandburg.

You probably know the story of Rip Van Winkle, who went to the mountains and ended up asleep for twenty years. It's a classic American short story. The author has a scintillating vocabulary, which makes the simple story quite a challenging read.

Jack London's Call of the Wild, about a California dog kidnapped to the Yukon during the Gold Rush, explores how deep our "civilization" really runs. What does life look like without external moral boundaries?

And the classic To Kill a Mockingbird, one of my favorites, looks at racial tension in the South, with a bit of courtroom drama (and who doesn't love that?).

Apart from these, most of the books are not challenging reads. Some of the topics are more mature than I'd prefer for elementary school children. For example, Keeping Score includes a character who returned from the Korean War with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after he witnessed war crimes. This is not comfortable history, though told gently. Rules of the Road's main character is a teen who has to figure out what it looks like to have a relationship with a drunk, deadbeat dad. Bonanza Girl, despite the incredible charm of the story, deals with intense racism in an Idaho gold-mining town.

None of these books focus on dark things. But they all include it, making this, I believe, an excellent transitional course, for upper middle school and lower high school.

Overall, this is a charming collection, diverse, interesting, enjoyable, and thought-provoking.

Life Skills

The counter-cultural view presented in Dating With Integrity challenges your children to stop and think about how they view dating. It also provides a great opportunity for you to discuss positive, healthy interaction with members of the opposite sex.

Language Arts

Fully integrated with the Literature, this year's Language Arts builds on past years and continues to develop literary analysis, creative writing, research, and essay skills, with weekly writing assignments in a range of lengths and topics.

Estimated daily time for American Literature: Student: 45min.