A Do-It-Yourself High School Literature/Composition Course
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Friends, I have an awesome guest post to share with you today! I very rarely publish guest posts, but couldn’t resist sharing this one all about creating a high school literature course. This post was written by Denise Boiko, author of the fantastic book Homeschooled and Headed for College. Keep reading to see how to create a high school literature and composition course.
Gotta love those DIY home projects, whether they involve building a custom piece of furniture, painting a mural on your child’s wall, or creating a stackable storage system for your laundry room. While I have done none of these, I am much more familiar with DIY homeschool projects. Today’s project is creating an entire high school literature and composition course out of nothing more than a few library books (or used copies you can pick up almost anywhere).
The advantages? No packaged curriculum is needed; the course is flexible and customizable, and you can go as deeply into the learning as you desire. This course can easily serve as an entire year’s worth of English credit at either standard or honors level.
How to Create a High School Literature and Composition Course
Decisions, decisions…
One of your first decisions involves whether you’ll be doing this high school literature course with your student alone or reaching out to other homeschoolers to offer a class, or at least a discussion group. While both options offer excellent learning opportunities, consider getting a few other students involved in order to stimulate livelier and more memorable discussions.
Another decision has to do with what “flavor” of literature you will study. In my homeschool academy classes, I rotate among American, British, World, and English Lit/Comp (I ran out of names for that fourth year!). Or if you want to go more focused, consider a Shakespeare class, 19th Century Novels, 20th Century Women Authors…you get the idea.
Go on a scavenger hunt
Now the real fun begins. When it comes to choosing books and other literature you’ll study, it may even resemble the “kid in a candy store” syndrome. Too much great literature, too little time. As you ponder potential titles, go ahead and check out likely candidates from the library or read online reviews to determine appropriate age level, length of the book, and other factors.
Here are some guidelines I use when I plan my classes.
- Assemble a mix of literature types. For a given year, choose a few novels, a couple of plays, several short stories, and a dash of nonfiction and poetry.
- Choose a mix of short and long selections, as well as difficult and easier reading. This way, you can stretch your students’ abilities while giving them a breather in between the more challenging works.
- Discern appropriateness for your student and family. Suitability scale may involve Christian content, and/or decent content in terms of sexual situations, profanity, and values being upheld or discarded by main characters. Beyond these basics, go a little deeper: choose books for their edifying themes, excellent messages, and memorable characters. You may start with books you’re already familiar with as a “core” for your course and add a few more after quickly evaluating them.
- If you’re feeling at sea, consult high school literature lists online. You can also look up Christian high schools or Christian online courses and see what books their student read.
For example, my American Lit class reads the following selections:
Short stories:
- “The Green Door” by O. Henry
- “Makes the Whole World Kin” by O. Henry
- “The Crimson Cord” by Ellis Parker Butler
- “A White Heron” by Sarah Jewett
- “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe
- “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce
Novels:
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
- My Antonia by Willa Cather
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Poetry:
- Selected American poetry
Nonfiction:
- Excerpts from Benjamin Franklin’s writings
- Declaration of Independence
- Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
- Selections from Abraham Lincoln’s speeches and writings
- Selections from Emerson and Thoreau essays
- Selections from Martin Luther King, Jr. speeches
Plays:
- Our Town by Thornton Wilder
While you’re at it, pick up a companion book for literature analysis. I love Windows to the World by Lesha Myers, as it helps newbies delve into the techniques of analyzing literature and writing well-thought-out essays based on their observations.
Last update on 2026-09-20 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API
Brainstorming time!
You’re the teacher, and you get to decide on the types of assignments your student will do – but for extra fun and motivation, do include your student in this brainstorming session. Note that you do not have to assign an essay or project for each and every selection read. For some, you can just read and discuss.
My favorite methods of evaluation are essays and projects, with a “side” of annotations.
Annotations: What are annotations? These are brief notes the student takes while reading the book or story, designed to draw out observations about characters, possible symbols, perplexing questions, comments on interesting author techniques, definitions of new words, and more. I include annotations as part of the class participation score, especially since not all students are equally vocal during discussions.
Essays: I typically assign three or four essays per semester, and each of these needs to be revised after I initially score them. Note that literature analysis essays are not book reports simply narrating the plot. Instead, they defend a thesis and use quotes and examples from the text as support, along with commentary (analysis) that show why those quotes are significant.
Here’s a sample prompt: “What is the role of nostalgia in The Great Gatsby? Consider which characters display nostalgia, and why. Why would the author make such a strong use of nostalgia; in other words, what point might he be trying to make?”
Projects: Projects represent the “jewel” of lit class. You might ask your student to do one project per semester—substituting a project for an essay they would otherwise have written.
I can’t even begin to describe all the wonderful projects my students have dreamed up. We’ve had a working guillotine model after reading A Tale of Two Cities (the mini-guillotine could actually cut a carrot), a Rice Krispie treat map of South Africa for Cry, the Beloved Country, embroidery samplers of memorable quotes, breathtaking paintings, comic strips, collections of “Tweets” from characters, Jeopardy games galore, and scrapbooks of characters’ pictures accompanied by memorable quotes. Offer your student a wide array of choices: art work, games, food, music, skits or speeches, 3-D models, journal entries of a character, and endless other possibilities!
Related: How to Make a Rice Krispie Treat Map
Extra credit is also an option as you plan your high school literature course. If your student is not happy with one of his or her essay scores, offer extra credit that is not simply busy work–extra creative projects, extra annotations, or writing an essay they could otherwise have skipped.
In my early years of course planning when I needed to gather lots of ideas, I made heavy use of teachers’ course syllabi that I found online. This helped with pacing, setting the number and types of assignments, and other “structural” elements, along with gathering lists of book titles these teachers used. But once I got my footing, so to speak, I put together my own template and have been enjoying this model ever since.
The elephant in the room: “But I’m not a literature expert…”
Guess what? Neither was I. I was a biology major who took exactly one lit class in college. But since that time, I’ve taught high school lit/comp to hundreds of students.
So how do you become an expert?
Once again, the internet is your friend. For instance, it’s quite easy to find loads of discussion questions. Just search up the title of your book alongside “essay prompts” or “discussion questions” and choose the ones that appeal to you and your student.
You may hit real pay dirt by finding a full study guide for a classic book. These will include background on the author, social/historical context for the story, chapter by chapter notes, discussion questions, vocabulary words, correlations with other similar works, and countless other goodies. Even if you don’t find a full study guide, do look up the background of the author and the context of the book. This information is very helpful for your first lesson on the piece of literature.
What about grading?
To evaluate your student’s essays, first set up a few standard elements you’re looking for. I divide my grading rubric into four sections: Content, Organization, Style, and Mechanics, and give points in each category for a total of 100. (My book, Homeschooled & Headed for College, has a detailed sample essay rubric.)
As you mark essays, be sure to comment on what is right, not just what is wrong. And for maximum learning, do have your student revise every essay. I tend to mark everything I would like the student to change—so there’s definitely a sea of gel ink by the time I’m done— but I do not “slash” the points. Low numerical scores are not conducive to building confidence and encouragement as students work to become better writers. And I never grade in red ink. I tell my students that we don’t want it to look like something bled and died all over their essay.
Projects can be graded based on effort, neatness, creativity, evidence of learning, and inclusion of details from the piece of literature. For my students, projects receive the same number of points (100) as do essays.
How can we make it fun?
Use as many of the five senses as possible as you study a book. Try audiobooks if your student benefits from them–you can redeem the time during many of those car rides! Search up film versions of the book, either before or after reading, and compare. Choose and prepare some foods mentioned in the book, or decorate cupcakes accordingly (Cupcakes can be correlated to any school subject.) The food-related activities are tasty additions to group discussion days if you are meeting with others.
Be creative and have fun! This past year, with the help of Zoom, my brother and I recorded an “interview with CS Lewis” as my class launched into two of Lewis’s books. I enjoyed a “jolly” bonding time with my brother as he dressed up as Lewis (complete with a pipe, hat, and fake British accent) and reflected on “his” life and career, with a few inside jokes thrown in. So feel free to use the wonders of technology to create videos, websites, or other nifty additions to your literary ventures.
What might a sample class session look like?
A day in the life of a Lit/Comp class divides itself among literature learning and tidbits about the craft of writing. If you are meeting several times per week, you have a great deal of scope for variation. My high school literature classes meet only once a week, but on a typical class day, we do the following:
- Discussion of a portion of the book, or an entire short story–launched by questions I’ve prepared ahead of time.
- Tidbits from the students’ annotations. Some weeks, I spend the entire class session asking each student, one by one, to share at least one item from their annotations. Whether this is a question to clear up confusion, a simple observation on the plot or a character, or a complex, deep, theme-like nugget we can all use as a “takeaway,” it’s exciting to hear the students’ own thoughts.
- If time permits, we might have a short or longer game, whether that is Jeopardy, Hangman, Twenty Questions, or other creative games
- If a student has done a project, we take a moment to appreciate it (or eat it).
- Most weeks, I spend at least a few minutes going over tips on essay writing. You might work in a few hints per week and design some collaborative class activities to emphasize the day’s main point: blending quotes smoothly into a sentence, constructing awesome thesis statements, creating a sentence packed full of techniques like similes or alliteration—whatever your student(s) currently need to work on.
A home-crafted high school literature and composition course can be a very satisfying DIY project, with ripples of learning that extend far into the future. Long after you’ve remodeled your laundry room or painted over the mural in your child’s room, your student will be benefiting from the themes and characters that became a part of their heart and mind.
About Denise . . .
Denise Boiko is mom of two grown homeschool (and college!) graduates. Her 440-page book, Homeschooled & Headed for College: Your Road Map for a Successful Journey, walks parents and students through the often-perplexing path to college admissions and answers those endless questions that start with “And what about college?” Denise has taught writing, biology, and literature classes at homeschool academies for the past 15 years and loves to partner with homeschooling parents to lend a hand as they construct customized curricula, create credible transcripts, and craft compelling counselor letters. In her pockets of spare time, Denise enjoys making friends with neighborhood cats (especially black ones), baking lemon bars, watching old Monk crime drama episodes, and meeting former students for coffee.
Thank you so much for all of the great information Denise! I definitely picked up a few tips to help teach my daughter’s high school literature course this year!
Be sure to follow Denise online and order her book!
Website: HomeschoolRoadMap.com
Facebook: Homeschooled and Headed for College: Your Road Map for a Successful Journey
Book: Homeschooled and Headed for College: Your Road Map for a Successful Journey <—- Head here to check out a few sample chapters!
Last update on 2026-09-20 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API
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