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As a parent, choosing the right English curriculum for your middle schooler can feel overwhelming. There are so many options out there – from traditional textbooks to online programs to literature-based studies. How do you decide what’s best for your child? First, take a deep breath. There is no one-size-fits-all curriculum that works for every student. The “best” choice depends on your child’s learning style, interests, academic strengths and weaknesses, and your family’s educational philosophy. That said, here are some middle school English curriculum paths to consider:

FundaFunda Academy

FundaFunda Academy offers a number of English courses for middle schoolers, including Writing Fun for Middle Schoolers and Writing Mechanics. FundaFunda classes are asynchronous (no live component) but have weekly deadlines and the students interact with each other and the teachers.

Writing Fun for Middle Schoolers

Writing Fun for Middle Schoolers is perfect for students who hate to write. The assignments are unusual and sometimes a bit zany. The purpose is to make writing so enjoyable students forget they are writing! Instead of grades, students will receive feedback which will include plenty of praise for what they have done right, as well as suggestions for improvement. Plus, they will be able to earn prizes!

Writing Mechanics

In Writing Mechanics, on the other hand, students will learn the mechanics they need in order to write well. They will do exercises to improve their grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary and then they will put what they have learned into practice. Students will also learn to proofread their own work and peer review their classmates’ essays. This claims aims to prepare students for the rigors of high school English classes.

Seven Sisters Homeschool

Seven Sisters Homeschool offers a wide variety of English courses for middle schoolers. Some of their longer form options include Middle School Short Story Writing Guide: Fairy Tales and Middle School Guide to Essay Writing. The also offer various literature study guides. 

Middle School Short Story Writing Guide: Fairy Tales

In Middle School Short Story Writing Guide: Fairy Tales, students will learn to understand the elements of a fairy tale, create characters, establish settings, develop backstory, form plots, write dialogue, edit, and proofread. This course is designed to be used 4 days a week for 5 weeks. The lessons are short and designed to help students achieve success.

Middle School Guide to Essay Writing

Middle School Guide to Essay Writing is a 10-week course designed to be used 4 days per week. It teaches students basic essay format, persuasion, literary analysis, how to write compare/contrast essays, how to write editorials/letters to the editor, and it also includes tips for taking short-answer essay tests to give your student skills they will need for the future.

Literature Study Guides

Seven Sisters Homeschool’s literature guides are meant to be used in conjunction with the book they relate to. These guides teach students about background information, genre, vocabulary words from the book, and summarization and plot development. They include comprehension questions for each chapter and suggested supplemental activities as well. There are literature study guides for a wide variety of classics including Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Snow Treasure, and Sarah, Plain and Tall.

Literary Adventures

Literary Adventures offers a plethora of online bookclubs for students of all ages, including middle schoolers! Each one is designed to take about a month to complete they include background information and hands-on activities. They are designed to instruct your student in spelling, grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension, literature, and writing. There are many options to choose from, including A Wrinkle in Time, Holes, Bud, Not Buddy, and Wonder.

The array of choices may seem bewildering at first. But look at your child and family’s needs, and don’t be afraid to mix and match components from different programs. Taking the time upfront to carefully select the right fit can immensely enrich your student’s middle school English experience.

Looking for More Resources?

If you are curious about other options, take a look at this blog post on online English games!

The post Homeschool Middle School English appeared first on FundaFunda Academy.

Wondering what your child’s high school English curriculum will look like? Confused by the abundance of options? Wanting to see a four-year schedule? FundaFunda Academy offers no shortage of high school English courses for you and your child to explore. So, which English courses should your child take during their four years of high school? Read on to find out!

Three Tracks

In large part, the courses your child takes will depend on their skill level. That’s why we offer three different tracks: struggling, average, and advanced.

Struggling

If English is not your child’s strongest suit, or if they don’t like English very much, we recommend the struggling track. It is slower-paced, and the basics are emphasized in freshman year before moving on to longer essays in subsequent years.

Average

The average track is designed for the students who have some experience with the basics of paper-writing and literary analysis, but who are not quite ready for more intense courses. This is our most commonly used track. Students begin with a firm grounding in MLA format before moving on to various literature courses of their choice.

Advanced

Finally, the advanced track is for students who have extensive prior experience with English and who love it. This track cuts to the chase, putting students through their paces with more challenging literature courses from the start.

The Courses

Choosing curriculum is no easy task for any parent. Here at FundaFunda, we hope that, with the right information, you will be able to make the decision that is best for you and your child. Below is a brief description of each of our English courses. That way, you can know exactly what your child will be studying in any given year, and you can use these descriptions to build a schedule that works for your family.

Writing Mechanics

This class is intended for students who need practice with the mechanics of writing. These are the tools they need in order to do well on the ACT and SAT, and also to write papers at college. The class will cover punctuation, grammar, vocabulary, and proofreading using a variety of online, self-grading resources. Students will write several essays, as well as learn to peer review one another’s essays before they are graded by a teacher.

High School English Literature and Composition

This class is designed for 9th grade students and prioritizes learning the basics of writing essays for future high school and college success. It includes an introduction to MLA format, ongoing vocabulary and grammar work, and a comprehensive array of literary elements, genres, and subjects. It is an overall introduction to high school English so students are better prepared for higher level classes.

Exploring Jane Austen

In this 1/2 credit class students will explore the world Jane Austen lived in, read 3 of her novels and compare them to film versions as well as discuss how relevant they are to our lives today. Assignments will consist of asynchronous discussions, video responses, fun projects like creating social media profiles of the characters, and one or two written essays. There will be an optional live discussion at a time that works for most of the class.

Visual Literacy

This 1/2 credit course intends to give students the tools to notice more of the images in their daily life and learn how to critically engage with them. Over the 16 weeks, students will watch movies, television shows, YouTube channels, music videos and look at photos, advertisements, artwork, graphic novels, and websites.

British Literature

Starting in Anglo-Saxon England, this course will reach back in time to some of our earliest literature and study how the written word has been used to convey cultural shifts and political and religious ideas. Students will read novels, plays, short stories, and poetry by the prominent writers of British literature. 

American Literature

Starting with the Foundational Literary Period and ending in the Postmodern Era, this class covers all the major writers and poets in American literature. Students will read novels, plays, short stories, and poetry that reflect the ideas, struggles, and achievements of the last 400 years. 

Independent Honors English

This class is ideal for the self-motivated, capable Junior or Senior who needs an English credit and cannot attend a class in person. Students will read a variety of works focused around storytelling, which is the foundation of every culture in the world. From reading myths and fables to contemporary novels and memoirs, students will be exposed to a variety of voices and genres, as well as lessons learned from centuries of lived experiences. They will look at how new stories are built from old ones and consider why there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to exploring the human condition.

Need More Options?

Here are some other English options we like:

• Music in Our Homeschool’s Ten Weeks of Shakespeare Introductory Course. This is self-paced and parent graded
• Literary Adventures has many self-paced options for high schoolers
• Seven Sisters Homeschool has a variety of English courses for all four years of high school, as well as study guides for literature books and this course on how to write a research paper

In Conclusion…

This is a lot of information to take in. If you have any questions about any of these courses, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. We would be more than happy to assist you in any way that we can. You can email info@fundafunda.com or the teacher listed for a specific class. Good luck on your high school English journey; we hope to hear from you soon!

Other Blog Posts You May Enjoy:

• Online English Games to Use in Your Homeschool

The post Suggested Sequence of FundaFunda’s High School English Classes appeared first on FundaFunda Academy.

Eight years ago, when I started teaching English at a local homeschool co-op, I took the opportunity to build an academic plan that checked a few essential boxes: writing standards according to MLA format, space for critical thinking and discussion, and exposure to themes and ideas that spotlight the human condition. 

When it came to creating a solid book list, I knew Frankenstein, Fahrenheit 451, and To Kill a Mockingbird would be fixtures. Shakespeare was a given. Then came Beowulf, Animal Farm, and A Study in Scarlet. I pulled poetry from American and British literary periods and added Greek tragedies and American plays to our studies on drama. Each of the classes I teach, which span ninth to twelfth grades, is grounded in classic literature because of its timelessness, influence, and universal appeal. 

And yet, my classes are also grounded in contemporary works, such as Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, and These Silent Woods by Kimi Cunningham Grant. I’ve included short stories by Ted Chiang and excerpts from Freakonomics. While there’s value in reading the classics, there is plenty of room for studying current points of view. 

Reading both classic and contemporary works accomplishes a few key things: 

1. Students connect the dots between then and now

Where do archetypes come from? What’s the difference between a tragedy and a comedy? What stories help us understand our own history? These are the questions we endeavor to answer by reading classic works of literature. Whether a work was written in Anglo-Saxon England or the American South in the 1930s, there is more to explore than the plot and its characters. Reading classic works paints a vivid picture of the past. They are snapshots of a culture from a specific period of time.

2. They learn about intertextuality firsthand

It’s true that there is nothing new under the sun. While the details of a simple story will morph and change over time, the human condition is the same as it ever was. One of the ways writers explore the human condition is to take a previously written work and reimagine it, or respond to it, with a new story of their own creation. (For example, fans of Ruth Ware might not know that her 2019 novel The Turn of the Key is a reworking of Henry James’ 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw.)

When students read a piece of classic literature, followed by a work of intertextuality, they start to understand how stories are connected throughout time and cultures. Reading Animal Farm by George Orwell and Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn back to back shows students that we are, and always have been, susceptible to corrupt leaders.

3. Everyone will discover a story to enjoy

Give students enough options and they’re bound to finish the school year with a new favorite book. I cannot count the number of times a student has told me, “I thought I’d hate this book, but it’s actually my favorite from the whole year.”

If I can tick enough boxes with genre, characters, and writing style, and present these stories from centuries of creation, every student stands a chance of finding a book to like. Often, their preconceived notions are debunked and they walk away with an appreciation for stories old and new.

One of my guiding principles when it comes to teaching English is making sure there is a balance between the hard and easy, the boring and entertaining, the obvious and abstract. When we vacillate between classic and contemporary literature, we end up with well-rounded respect for storytellers across generations. 

Jennie Miller teaches FundaFunda’s High School English and Independent Honors English classes.

The post A Case for Reading Both Classic and Contemporary Literature appeared first on FundaFunda Academy.

Here are five reading and writing skills and strengths your graduating senior should have before heading off to college: 

1. Write paragraphs using varying sentence lengths

While this seems obvious, too many teens struggle to shift from text-style writing (short messages with poor punctuation) to long-form academic composition. One of the first lessons I teach in all of my English classes is how to develop paragraphs that have a variety of Simple, Compound, Complex, and Compound-Complex sentences.

Simple sentences offer natural pauses. Compound sentences link two ideas together, and Complex sentences provide continuity from one set of points to the next. From answering essay questions to writing lengthy research papers, presenting information with varying sentence lengths creates a flow of words that’s easier to read and displays the writer’s understanding of the content.

2. Edit with both the eye and ear

If the process of writing a rough draft is tedious, then editing the draft can feel like next-level torture. Reading and re-reading the same sentences – especially if the content is dull – ends up being an ineffective editing method.

This presents the perfect time to read your work out loud because the ear will catch mistakes that the eyes miss. When students read their essays out loud, preferably in a different location than where it was originally written, they’ll stumble upon sentences that don’t flow well, don’t make sense, or have missing bits of information. They’ll hear where the natural breaks should be to start a new paragraph, find a misspelled word, or realize they followed a tangent for way too long.

Take your laptop into a different room, or, better yet, print out your draft and read it aloud outside. Turn silent reading from a screen into an audible production on the front porch, and you’re bound to edit the draft effectively and turn it into a polished essay.

3. Cultivate a discipline for sitting down to read an entire book

One of the trends I’ve noticed in traditional schools is paring down the number of full books high school students read and replacing them with excerpts and articles. I couldn’t believe that some students are graduating high school having read only a few full books across four years. Call me old school, but opting out of novels in exchange for excerpts doesn’t help our already diminishing attention spans.

As a rule, my students are expected to read upwards of eight novels per year, in addition to an array of plays, articles, short stories, and poems. College-bound teens will be expected to engage with textual information effectively, whether in English class or in other disciplines. When students are able to sit down and read a book in its entirety, they are better suited to handle the workload of higher ed and focus on a variety of subjects and assignments therein. (This applies to audiobooks as well.) 

4. Be intellectually curious

Why did the author write this book? What was going on in his/her life that prompted the story? What impact did the novel have when it was published?

So much can be gained when we dig deeper into the meaning of a work, its inspiration, and its influence on literature-at-large. The same concept applies to all areas of academia, in fact. Students who excel in STEM subjects will benefit from reading biographies of their favorite scientists, just as history buffs will benefit from including historical fiction into their repertoire. Knowledge is connective, and being intellectually curious sets you up for a lifetime of learning.

5. Re-read books for deeper understanding

This is a no-brainer for older generations who’ve already experienced re-reading a classic novel as an adult that they were made to read in high school. The same applies to students, even if it means re-reading something only a year or two after the original engagement.

I’ve had the pleasure of hearing back from a few students who re-read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or George Orwell’s Animal Farm years after it was required reading. They got a little older, gained a little more perspective, and re-read the books out of curiosity, only to discover they loved the stories even more than they did the first time and came away with renewed appreciation. I’ve even had a student re-read Beowulf for fun, which is no small feat.

While there’s no need to revisit every book from high school English, going back to a few favorites, or at least the ones that stuck with you, will offer a deeper understanding of the work and re-establish a connection to the information you learned years ago.

Jennie Miller teaches FundaFunda’s High School English and Independent Honors English classes.

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