High School Language Arts: Three Solutions

by Beverly S. Krueger

Preparing students for college means preparing them to think critically and write well. College courses require a lot of reading and a lot of writing whether that’s a three-page paper or an essay examination. The standard college admissions requirement is four credits in language arts. By that, they mean four years of work. There are a number of excellent curricula to help you accomplish this. I’ll look at three Christian curriculum solutions for average students, advanced students, and students who want a more flexible curriculum. Each solution expects the student to already have a good grounding in grammar and punctuation.

Let’s start with the average student. Smarr Publishers has a series of high school level classical literature courses that take a student through an introductory course and surveys of world, British, and American literature. The publisher guarantees that students who complete these courses will score at least 650 on the language arts portion of the SAT college entrance exam. They’ll pay for the test if you don’t reach that score. It’s obvious the publisher thinks well of this course. These are definitely college preparatory courses. Students will be reading extensively and will write 6-8 essays in each course. The writing instruction in this series is excellent. If you’re looking for a course that will teach your student to write, this course will do admirably. The majority of the question sets for each lesson are recall type questions that don’t require as much thought as the critical thinking questions. If you’re looking for more focused teaching on literary analysis, you’ll want to look into the curriculum I suggest for advanced students. Average college-bound students will find the work level in this course just about right.

If you have an advanced language arts student, you’ll want to look at the Encouraging Thoughtful Christians to Be World Changers language arts series by James P. Stobaugh. This series will require a great deal from the student. In some courses, the author suggests students start reading course content the summer before starting the course. That’s because the course is based on whole works, so when War and Peace is studied, it needs to be read in its entirety. The student is also expected to write one to three essays each week. The parent can choose to make the writing load less or more because there are ten to twenty different essay topics available in most lessons. The writing instruction in this course is not quite as good as in the Smarr Publisher books or Wordsmith Craftsmen (discussed below). Questions in this series are higher level thinking questions rather than mere recall questions. Questions cover critical literary analysis, biblical application, and enrichment that take the student farther. This is truly an advanced language arts series. The course content is quite similar to what students will experience in college level literature courses.

The flexible solution is really two pieces, one for literature study, and one for writing instruction. For my money, the Progeny Press series of literature study guides can’t be beat. They incorporate all levels of Bloom’s taxonomy in their questions, they require biblical application, and you can select the literature you want to study. If you need something easier for a high school student, you can select from their guides for younger grades and work your way up to the high school level guides. There are currently 30 high school level guides available including one on poetry. You won’t have a systematic approach to literary analysis with these guides, but the guides do provide instruction on literary analysis appropriate for the work being studied. You also won’t have the typical survey-of-American-literature-type English credit. These guides are currently $16 each, and Progeny Press will send you a fifth guide free when you buy four guides. For writing instruction, you cannot do better the Wordsmith Craftsman. This inexpensive book gives instructions on a variety of writing modes besides the essay, it covers the basics of writing well, and it provides excellent instruction on the following essay types: descriptive, narrative, expository, and persuasive. At $16, it’s a bargain.

You’ll find many of these resources in the Eclectic Homeschool Resource Center’s Literature Resources and Progeny Press Study Guides: A-K or Progeny Press Study Guides: L-Z.

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