Excellence in Literature-Introduction to Literature

Introduction to Literature (English 1)
Janice Campbell
Print book- $29 plus $4.95 priority shipping, 132 pgs
Ebook- $27

"Introduction to Literature is a college-preparatory literature and composition course. Focus works, including novels, short stories, poems, and drama, have been selected for literary quality, and for their place in the historical development of literature. Context readings provide background information about the author, the historical period, and the literary and artistic context of the focus work.
Students will gain an understanding of the development of literature and will practice the skills of close literary analysis through essays, approach papers, and other evaluative writing."
Objectives and literature selections can be reviewed here

The author has a great article on why she selected the literary pieces she did on her blog

Introduction to Literature is broken down into 9 units and each unit has suggestions for weekly breakdowns, leaving the application of the work, largely, up to the student. I love that there is a focus text that really is the anchor of the unit, but that other pieces of literature are given to give the student a better feel for the particular period being covered or the background of the author, giving the student a greater understanding of the focus text. There is some fabulous material in the beginning of the book breaking the main periods of literature into categories, explaining the basic worldview of that period and giving an example of work. I found this very helpful for both myself and my high school son. This course is a college prep course that supplies an English credit, but can do double duty as an honors text if you student would like to take an AP or CLEP test at the end of studying the material. Extra literary pieces and assignments are given for those who would like to have this count as an Honors or AP class.

What I loved:
I LOVE that this was written by a homeschool mom of 4 boys…I appreciate her being “One of Us “and really knowing the unique challenges homeschool parents face in teaching their children and creating a product that helps us be able to offer this course to our children. I really love the thought that went into the writing of this textbook. There are many helps for the student both in the front of the text and in the back where models for papers are, as well as some examples. This is very student directed and self teaching, which is fabulous when you are teaching many children. The pieces of literature have substance and purpose for being in the text and I loved reading about that in the blog piece written by the author. The books selected to be read are easy to find and many of the context pieces are found online for FREE which is ALWAYS a wonderful blessing. For each unit, Janice Campbell gives the students a little bit of direction with the “Something to think about…” and “Be sure to notice…” sections in the introduction to the literary piece for the unit. There is also some information that I found helpful in evaluating my student’s writing.

Something to note in the E-book version-
I really don’t have anything I did not like about this textbook, but there was one small challenge to some…and that was the links to the contextual resources. You will need to copy and paste the link, rather than just click on it. It was not an issue for me as I had a heads up that the “links” were not working…one of my crew mates discovered that they needed to be pasted into a browser. Every link I pasted worked fine.

I think this is an excellent product and would recommend it to someone looking for a high school/college prep level literature course. There are 5 titles available in this series of Curriculum. You can review those here and see the summary of literature pieces covered in all the books here



See what my crew mates had to say about Excellence in Literature Introduction to Literature here

Disclaimer: I received this item for the purpose of writing a fair and honest review. I received no other compensation. All the opinions expressed are my own.