World Literature

World Literature is a great course to include on the homeschool high school transcript. What makes a good World Literature credit?

The other day, I was chatting with one of the homeschool high schoolers that I advised for her upperclass years. She shared with me that her World Literature homeschool group class was her favorite English class in high school. She was in the same class as my youngest son. He loved the course also, so I’ll share what they did for World Literature.

-Real books

A great homeschool high school World Literature credit will cover books from around the world, either written in other countries and translated into English or by English authors who know the culture well. (Our 7 Sisters Homeschool World Lit includes a few from several different time periods.)

They added to their reading lists with books of their own choice. Each year in homeschool high school, our local homeschool high schoolers read between 15-50 books (according to the grade and course level of each student). This includes at least 3 classics and can count 10 books of the Bible (yep, we count each one as a book), a few audiobooks, other books of interest.

-Writing papers of many sorts

Each year in high school, our kids write (according to grade and course level) 2-8 five-paragraph essays, 4-8 short papers (including genres such as short stories, poetry, or other creative project), plus a 5-10 page paper (some of these must be research papers in MLA and APA formats). For a World Literature credit, some of these papers will be on World Literature topics (you will notice that in World Literature: A Full-Year High School Course, there are some suggested essays for each book).

For other papers, we used the as the anchor of their vocabulary work. My homeschool high schoolers were pushing for high SAT scores, so I supplemented with some extra work with SAT word lists and Freerice.com.

-Grammar and Language Mechanics

College bound homeschool high schoolers already have good grammar but they need to work hard on editing skills for college entrance exams and future college papers. Our local teens used the rubrics in their writing guides to enhance their editing skills.