Junior High Literature

The Online Academy will be offering a selection of novels from Kolbe Academy’s well known Junior High Literature program in Literature 7.  An emphasis on the five principles that are essential for the student to understand and apply in reading literature will be made:

• Read with objective charity
• Understand that the parts do not condemn the whole
• Recognize sin as such when he encounters it in his reading
• Avoid works that contain tempting descriptions of sin
• Understand that the function of fiction is not primarily to teach

Further, students will come to understand the four principles on the function of literature:

• Art is a moral activity
• Literature is fundamentally religious
• Art inspires
• Art is a means of charity

Students taking this course will have an exam after each text or unit.  Additionally, students should expect to have daily reading and minor weekly written assignments or quizzes.

Assignment due-dates and grades are established by the parent.  Optionally, a student may be enrolled in the Self-Paced Plus© grading assistance program to receive grading assistance from a Kolbe Academy faculty or staff member on designated assignments in the course.  In this case, parents will still submit final grades to Kolbe for the course, but may choose to incorporate the graded assignments into the student’s overall grade or use the Kolbe-graded assignments to assist in arriving at the student’s final grade.

Vocabulary will be incorporated into the course and will be relevant to the literary works read in class. 

Short Stories:

• The Gift of the Magi and Other Short Stories, O. Henry: The Story of the Other Wise Man, Henry Van Dyke. 
  • The Ransom of Red Chief
  • The Last Leaf
  • The Gift of the Magi
• The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway.  
• Three Short Stories.  
  • The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,Washington Irving
  • The Red Headed League, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  • The Devil and Daniel Webster, Stephen Vincent Benet
• A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens.  
  

Poetry:

Optional physical copies available for purchase for the following under the Literature 8-1 “Optional Material” section in the Kolbe Bookstore (digital copies are provided with the self-paced course).

• The Song of Hiawatha, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 
  
• A Collection of Poetry 
  • The Highwayman, Alfred Noyes
  • Lochinvar, Sir Walter Scott
  • The Wreck of the Hesperus, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  • The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel T. Coleridge
  • O Captain! My Captain, Walt Whitman
  • Sea Fever, John Masefield
  • Crossing the Bar, Alfred Lord Tennyson
  • The Lonely Street, William Carlos Williams
  • School’s Out, William Henry Davies
  • Daffodils, William Wordsworth
  • The Waterfall, Barbara Frances Lloyd
  • The Raven, Edgar Allen Poe
  • The Naming of Cats, T.S. Eliot
  • The Panther, Ogden Nash
  • If, Rudyard Kipling
  • The Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll
  • God’s Grandeur, Gerard Hopkins
  • An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, W.B. Yeats
  • Anthem to Doomed Youth, Wilfred Owen
  • Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred Lord Tennyson

Novels:

• The Fellowship of the Ring, J. R. R. Tolkien
• Oliver Twist, Charles Dickenson
• Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
• Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
• Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery

Saints:

• St. Maximilian Kolbe
• St. Kateri Tekakwitha

Self-Paced Plus courses include the following:

• Grading by a highly qualified teacher for selected assignments (listed below) in the course.
• Access to teacher through the course’s discussion board.
• Option to report grade given by the teacher, or to report a grade assigned by parent.
• The pacing is still established by the parent in conjunction with the student’s goals and academic calendar. 
• Assignments will be graded within 1-2 weeks of the submission date, excluding holiday breaks.  (For the quickest grading, students should turn assignments in incrementally throughout the year.  If a student turns in multiple assignments to be graded at once, expect a response time of 1-2 weeks per assignment submitted.)

Self-Paced Plus Assignment List:

*We developed a rubric to assist in grading the paper assignments.  Each paper assignment will have the rubric available for the student in the course.