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American Literature
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Get complete lesson plans, schedule and teaching notes for the entire year. American Literature Package includes the Level 430 American Literature Parent Guide and accompanying American Literature Student Guide. Package also includes all of the American Literature books for high school scheduled in these guides.


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Take up to one year to use your curriculum. If you don’t love it, return it! Complete details here.


Get complete lesson plans, schedule and teaching notes for the entire year. This American Literature Package includes the Level 430 American Literature Parent Guide and accompanying American Literature Student Guide. Package also includes all of the American Literature books for high school scheduled in these guides.
Overview of the Literature
Instructor's Guides
Literature 430 takes learners on a yearlong adventure of independent study. The Literature and Language Arts Student Guide provides daily reading and writing assignments, along with additional notes and questions that reinforce and challenge your student. The accompanying Parent Guide keeps you in touch and on track, so you can come alongside at any point in your student's learning.
American Literature
Once children have achieved basic literacy, they can read for information. That is much of what we read each day: news reports, how-to books, cookbooks. I never go to my cookbook cupboard to figure out the deeper meaning life.
True literature, though, requires more effort, more thought. A novel has the basic, surface-level plot. But what is it saying beyond that?
Mortimer Adler wrote How to Read a Book to help readers read better – to read and understand more than the basic plot. It isn't a fun book to read, the way a fast-paced novel is, but it is informative, and possibly life-changing.
This book serves as the general framework for Sonlight's 430 American Literature course. Rather than choosing a book from each of the major periods ("Pre-Colonial," "Transcendentalism," etc.), and working in chronological order, instead, this course uses my favorite books by American authors and allows Adler's instruction to help read these outstanding works with more understanding and enjoyment.
So, for example, after the schedule assigns Adler's chapter on "How to Read History," the students get to enjoy two-time Pulitzer winner David McCullough's short profiles of fascinating historical characters. (They're incredible.)
After the schedule assigns "How to Read Practical Books," the students look at the classic guide on writing, The Elements of Style, beautifully co-written by E.B. White (author of Charlotte's Web).
After Adler offers suggestions about reading Tragedy, the students read one of the greatest plays of the 20th Century, Death of a Salesman (it won both a Tony and a Pulitzer the year it came out).
How to read autobiographies? Practice on Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery and the breathtaking missionary biography Evidence Not Seen.
How to read imaginative literature? Practice on Their Eyes Were Watching God, one of the most cheerful portrayals of happily married people in all of literature.
How to read short stories? Practice on five stunning shorts by Wendell Berry.
And, at the end of the year, after Adler talks about "How to Read Social Science," the students read Malcolm Gladwell's encouragement that, yes, success takes a lot of time … but if you love what you're doing, it's worth it. Go change the world!
As always, I seek to have a good mix of genres. One category is The Great American Novel, a book that accurately shows the culture of the United States at a specific time. Incredibly, this course has four: The Scarlet Letter, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Separate Peace, and The Grapes of Wrath. These take place in, respectively, Colonial New England, the antebellum Midwest, an Eastern prep school, and the Great Depression South, moving to California. What a range of times and places!
This course has other genres, too: novels, detective stories, drama, lyric poems, short stories, history, tragedy, essays, science fiction, and autobiographies.
And I seek to balance the year as a whole, so that tragedies are balanced with more cheerful works; so that books that take a month to finish are followed by books that take a week or two; so that students read books by men and women of different ethnicities. This course is balanced in all those ways.
But mostly, I want your students to view each book as a delight and a gift, as I do.
Language Arts
For Language Arts, this course includes, as always, literary analysis. Also short daily writing assignments working through William Zinsser's On Writing Well.
Estimated daily time for American Literature: Student: 1 hr.
- Literature 430 Parent GuideGet all the lesson plans and teaching helps you need to effectively teach Literature and Language Arts for the entire year.Retail: $64.00
- Literature 430 Student GuideGet the daily schedule and tools your student needs for Literature and Language Arts for the entire year.Retail: $37.00
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- Up From SlaveryBooker T. Washington was a devoutly Christian man who, as a former slave, treaded a dangerous middle ground in a time of racial backlash and disfranchisement.Retail: $12.00
- A Separate PeaceDuring World War II, two students at a New England boarding school experience the dark, tragic side of adolescence. Intense, mesmerizing, and compelling coming-of-age tale. Powerful.Retail: $17.00
- Their Eyes Were Watching GodA powerful tale of one woman's life. Set in black communities in the Deep South in the early 1900s, and told with a stunning, deeply moving, almost poetic prose. Hurston breathes life into her characters...Retail: $17.99
- Ender's GameThe thrilling tale of Ender, a child genius in training to become Earth's top military commander. Aliens have already attacked twice. Now, Ender must complete his training and be ready to command against...Retail: $9.99
- OutliersContinuing a quest to explain us to ourselves, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell turns his inquiring mind to outliers —those individuals whose achievements surpass that of the masses. What, if anything,...Retail: $18.99
- Evidence Not SeenThe true story of a young American missionary's courage and faith deep in the jungles of New Guinea during World War II, her imprisonment in a Japanese prison camp and miraculous survival.Retail: $16.99
- Teaching a Stone to TalkPulitzer Prize winning author Annie Dillard explores the natural world and human meaning in this compilation of deceptively simple essays reminiscent of Emily Dickinson and Thoreau.Retail: $15.99
- Death of a SalesmanFirst performed onstage in 1949, author Arthur Miller's Pulitzer Prize winning drama continues to ask its audience some of life's most important questions, not the least of these, what is success? Through...Retail: $14.00
- FidelityFive stories set in the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, reveal the author's deep love of and concern for nature and the land. Through his writings, we learn about the cyclic rhythms of the agrarian...Retail: $16.95
- How to Read a BookOriginally published in 1940, now completely revised and updated, How to Read a Book is "the best and most successful guide to reading comprehension." Learn how to achieve the various levels of reading...Retail: $19.99
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"Notice. Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. -By...Retail: $26.95
- Brave CompanionsIn this masterful work of narrative history, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author with a gift for storytelling opens a window to the world, past and present, with a series of profiles about exceptional men...Retail: $17.00
- Elements of StyleIt's the "little book" that can have a BIG impact on your writing! The Elements of Style by Strunk and White is a classic manual that remains relevant today, it conveys the principles of English style...Retail: $14.99
- Best Short Stories of O. HenryThis collection offers for readers' delight the thirty-eight 0. Henry stories honored almost unanimously by anthologists and that represent, in variety and balance, the best work of America's favorite...Retail: $24.00
- The ChosenIn 1940s Brooklyn, an accident throws Reuven Malther and Danny Saunders together. Despite their differences (Reuven is a secular Jew with an intellectual, Zionist father; Danny is the brilliant son and...Retail: $17.00
- The Grapes of WrathNobel Prize winner "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck. "One of the greatest and most socially significant novels of the twentieth century."Retail: $18.00
- Jacob Have I LovedLouise knows that she should be proud of her beautiful twin Caroline. But she is convinced that, ever since they were born, Caroline has done nothing but take from her: their parents' love, Louise's hopes...Retail: $8.99
- My AntoniaH.L. Mencken once wrote, "No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Antonia."Retail: $8.99
- 100 Best-Loved PoemsThis book on poetry includes some of the best-loved English and American verse of all time -- Rudyard Kipling's "If," Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Village Blacksmith," John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian...Retail: $5.00
- Our TownPulitzer Prize. One of the most popular American dramas of all time, Our Town recalls three time periods in the life of residents of a small Connecticut town. It calls us to focus on the "little things"...Retail: $15.99
- The Portable PoePoe was perhaps the most melancholy and deeply brooding author in American history.Retail: $22.00
- The Scarlet LetterA study of the tension between public and private morality, The Scarlet Letter carved new paths in American literary technique and substance.Retail: $8.00
- On Writing WellOn Writing Well by William Zinsser is the bible for anyone who wants to learn how to write and write well. Before you put pen to paper, pick up the classic guide to nonfiction writing. Learn the fundamental...Retail: $19.99


100% MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE
Take up to one year to use your curriculum. If you don’t love it, return it! Complete details here.

