Hewitt Homeschooling~Lightning Literature

Hewitt Homeschooling's Lightning Lit guides use full-length novels, autobiographies, plays, essays, short stories, and poems to teach deep reading and composition skills.  Each of the high school guides are usually a one semester course for most students.  If the student is a struggling reader it might take more time to complete.  For those who excel in language arts additional reading materials are suggested.   All students will be exposed to exciting new authors. 

Each guide includes biographies of the authors; comprehension questions; lessons on the readings; writing exercises; any short stories, essays, or poems used for lessons; additional reading suggestions; and discussion questions.

There are twelve Lit guides available at the High School level.  They can be purchased as packs: which includes all the necessary books for $51.98.  Or you can purchase the guides alone for $29.95.  All of these can be purchased through their website.

Our thoughts:

We have used Hewitt Homeschooling for our end of the year testing.  We were excited to be chosen to review one of their actual curriculum.  The one we chose was American Literature: Mid-Late 19th Century.  The books that are covered in this curriculum are:

Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

The Call of the Wild by Jack London 

For review purposes we decided to read Huckleberry Finn.   As we read through the book there are a series of questions our children had to answer.  One thing that I loved was that the lessons were already prepared for me.  It was all scheduled out for me.  In our book that is a must.  There are two different schedules you can follow:

Semester (18 weeks)

Full Year (36 weeks)

Each Unit or Lesson has a "Literary Lesson".  Our lesson for Huckleberry Finn was "humor".  The kids enjoyed picking out the humor in the story.  We then proceeded to talk about the misunderstandings and confusion in the story. 

Something that I was impressed with in this curriculum was the writing exercises.  Of course when I told them we were going to stop reading for a time and work on our writing.  Did you hear the collective <sigh>?  But after they realized it was not going to be difficult they really didn't mind it.  Of course since we were talking about humor in literature it wasn't hard for them to write funny stories.

If you are looking for a great literature curriculum that includes reading and writing, this one is for you!

Do you want to see what my other crewmates are saying go here:

Disclaimer~As a member of TOS Homeschool Crew I was sent Lightning Lit and Comp free for review in exchange for my honest review.