Overview:
This was the first "real" literature class I taught to include my son, who was in 8th grade. Many of my students (including my son) had not yet had a class with grades and assignments with due dates. So even though British Lit is usually a subject for high school seniors, I taught it geared toward new high school students. Our class met once a week for an hour, and also had an online community on Google+. Students did weekly assignments and quizzes for grades and we also did a midterm and final both semesters. The second semester final was a role-playing game that wasn't really reproducible, but the others are here.
Objective:
To introduce students to the study of literature and literary terms, using British literature as material.
To introduce homeschooled students who may not have yet had a formal class to quizzes, assignments with due dates, and graded participation in online learning environments and class discussions.
To improve cultural literacy by at least brushing up against all the major British authors, and delve deeply into the works of a few.
Textbooks:
Adventures in English Literature, Pegasus Edition, Harcourt Brace. Readily available used, but it's important to get the right edition if you want the page numbers to line up.
We read four plays that were fully included in the the textbook: Dr. Faustus, The Importance of Being Earnest, Macbeth, and Pygmalion.
Novels (and novellas): Pride and Prejudice, Heart of Darkness, Animal Farm.
If you're teaching British history right along with the literature, which I think is a fine idea, I recommend The Story of Britain by Rebecca Frasier. For the first 300 pages, I wrote comprehension questions for each chapter, which you can find here. After that I just talked about the material with my son, without formally quizzing him. Maybe next time around I'll write the rest of the questions.
Quizzes:
The first semester, we used QuizStar for online quizzes, so those quizzes show up on the blog post as multiple choice. The second semester, I abandoned QuizStar because we were having a lot of technical problems and I was spending a lot of time resetting quizzes and adding time. So the second twenty lessons have short answer style quizzes.
Also, in the first semester we used buzzers to play Quiz Bowl, and learned a lot of vocabulary and dates that way. Our Quiz Bowl materials are here. The second semester, we started a Quiz Bowl team with its own meetings, so we didn't use the buzzers in lit class anymore.
Lesson Plans
Note: For each lesson plan in the first semester, I have a companion post of "Supplemental Posts" which contains everything I posted to the Google+ community as an assignment or for discussion.
First Semester:
Reading period 1: Kilhwch and Olwen
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 2: The Anglo-Saxon Period
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 3: Medieval
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 4: Chaucer, Malory, Gawain
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 5: The Renaissance
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 6: Dr. Faustus
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 7: Sonnets
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 8: Macbeth Acts 1-3
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 9: Macbeth Acts 4-5
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 10: Metaphysical Poets, Cavalier Poets
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 11: John Milton
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 12: Dryden, Pepys, Defoe
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 13: Moll Flanders
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 14: Swift and Pope
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 15: Johnson, Burns, and Blake
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 16: Wordsworth and Coleridge
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 17: Pride and Prejudice 1
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 18: Pride and Prejudice 2
Bennett Family Portraits
Reading period 19: Byron, Shelley, and Keats
Supplemental Posts
Reading period 20: Frankenstein
Reading period 21: Tennyson
Reading period 22: Browning & Browning
Reading period 23: Hopkins and Housman
Reading period 24: Rossetti & Rossetti
Reading period 25: Charles Dickens
Reading period 26: George Eliot
Reading period 27: Rudyard Kipling
Reading period 28: Thomas Hardy
Reading period 29: The Brontës
Reading period 30: Oscar Wilde
Reading period 31: Joseph Conrad
Reading period 32: E.M. Forster
Reading period 33: James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
Reading period 34: D.H. Lawrence
Reading period 35: Samuel Beckett
Reading period 36: George Orwell
Reading period 37: Yeats and Eliot
Reading period 39: Modern Poetry
Reading period 40: George Bernard Shaw
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