Lutheran educator Marie MacPherson is now offering the second installment in her one-year curriculum for high school American Literature. American Lit: Franklin & Douglas is the second in a series of seven units.
The first unit is Examining Worldviews in The Scarlet Letter and Other Puritan Writings, available over on this page or follow this link to get more information about Examining Worldviews in Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (also including works by Paine, Irving, Wheatley, and Emerson).
Instruction pages can be seen in this product’s media gallery.
This Franklin & Douglas Unit Study
This is a four-week unit, consisting of a PDF file for family use. (Please inquire about multi-use licenses for co-ops or schools.) The two textbooks, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, are both public domain and available for free online.
Each study guide includes:
- An overview of the time period in which the work was written,
- Vocabulary words,
- Themes,
- Life application,
- Related poetry and non-fiction,
- Recommendations for further reading, and
- An optional exam with answer key is also included.
Suggested supplies include:
- A Binder for this study guide and divided to drafts, completed papers, and finished exams
- A dictionary and thesaurus
- A computer and word-processing program, a printer
- Internet access for research
- Sticky tabs or other page marking devices and a pen for writing in the novels
- Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, both of which are public domain and available for free online.
To follow a chronological program, this unit study should follow Examining Worldviews in The Scarlet Letter and Other Puritan Writings, the first in a series of seven American literature units.
The Full-Year Plan
The student will survey American Literature from the time of the Native Americans, through the colonial, romantic, transcendentalist, and modern periods. The course discusses the development of American Literature as a genre using novels, short stories, plays, and poetry.
The course places special emphasis on comparing and contrasting the body of several well-known authors, such as Hawthorne and Hemingway, as well as lesser-known yet impactful minority authors, such as Potok and Angelou.
The student will complete a research paper and exam for each of seven units, as well as a cumulative final exam. Emphasis is given to the application of Christian discernment when analyzing American Literature.
