english credit

[Momof2IA]

I have a high schooler that needs some english suggestions.  He's a hands on kind of kid and doesn't like a lot  of workbooks.  What are some ideas you have?

Thanks

[SusanTheWriter]

Can you be a little more specific? Do you need grammar, composition or literature?

I'm an English geek, so putting together a set of works to study is no big deal for me. We're doing American Lit this year in concordance with US History, so I'm using study guides for the novels we'll be reading. I don't want her to write the same kind of paper for every book, so we'll do different types of projects. For American Poetry, she had to write a short essay on Edgar Allan Poe, but she also wanted to do her own illustrations to go with it.

I'm tossing around the idea of getting her to learn how to embroider a letter "A" for our study on The Scarlet Letter. Or maybe an art piece with the letter as the center, with different symbols from the novel around it.

For Huckleberry Finn, I may get her to make her own raft and do a Power Point on the different points of the Mississippi River that they traveled.

We'll do either To Kill a Mockingbird or Grapes of Wrath in the spring for our section on the Great Depression. I haven't dreamed up a project for that book yet.

The idea is that while yes, she'll have to do some writing along the way, it won't be just churning out essay after essay. Doing the book studies at the same time we're studying that period in history should help her understand the literature, too.

She does have to do a formal research paper of 10-15 pages, but that's on a topic of her own choosing.

[Momof2IA]

Wow some good ideas; thanks. We are following Story of the World and there are reading suggestions to go along with it but sometimes it doesn't seem like enough. I like the idea of incorporating more with what we are already learning. English and writing came easy to me and I loved it but my son does not so much. I have been racking my brain. Sometimes I can't see the forest for the trees.