English Language Arts

About this course

Tenth grade turns toward English and American literature and toward the tests that come at the end of high school. The literature strand covers Shakespearean five-act structure, Homer and the heroic tradition, Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon heroic code, the nineteenth-century novel through Dickens and Austen, the American Gothic short story through Poe and Hawthorne, tragedy and the tragic hero, and an American literature survey that runs from Winthrop's city upon a hill and Jonathan Edwards through Franklin, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson, and does not shy from reading that arc as the story of a culture that starts with the Bible and gradually moves away from it. Two lessons stand out. One introduces four critical lenses (historical-biographical, formalist close reading, moral-philosophical, and reader-response), applies all four to the parable of the Good Samaritan, and says plainly which one it considers most compatible with a Christian reading and why reader-response alone risks becoming personal preference. The other is a grammar unit closer that takes apart four grammar myths: never split an infinitive, never end a sentence with a preposition, never begin with and or but, and passive voice is always wrong, explaining where each came from and what the real standard is.

Grammar this year is about sophistication rather than correctness. It opens with sentence diagramming as a way to see structure, then covers verbals as phrases, absolute phrases, appositives, parallel structure, dangling modifiers, subordination and coordination, purposeful use of semicolons, colons, and dashes, and register and voice. Writing covers expository, literary analysis, argumentative, compare-contrast, cause-effect, personal essay and memoir, and descriptive modes, plus timed AP-style essay practice, integrating evidence, peer editing, revision, and a portfolio. Research runs the full MLA paper and adds the annotated bibliography and the CRAAP test for source credibility. Reading and vocabulary work explicitly toward standardized tests: SQ3R and annotation, reading charts and visual data, two lessons of test reading strategy, SAT and ACT high-frequency word sets, the Academic Word List, and a grammar-for-standardized-tests lesson. There are also lessons on reading archaic language in both Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and on Hebrew parallelism in biblical poetry.

The course is 180 lessons across 15 units, twelve per unit, one per school day, at about 55 minutes each. Units 1 through 8 cover reading, vocabulary, comprehension, grammar, writing, literature, research, and communication; units 9 through 15 return to seven of those strands with additional lessons. Be aware that the second pass is looser than the first: within those later units several topics come up more than once, so active and passive voice appears three times in the second grammar unit, and source evaluation and plagiarism each appear more than once in the second research unit. Treat those as spaced practice rather than new ground. Every lesson ends with a ten-question quiz that grades itself. Coming in, your student should be writing thesis-driven analytical essays and reading full-length classic works independently.

What the course covers

• Shakespeare, Beowulf, Homer, and the epic and heroic traditions
• Dickens, Austen, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson
• American literature from the Puritans through the nineteenth century
• Four critical lenses and reading an author's worldview
• Sentence diagramming, verbals, absolutes, and appositives
• Purposeful punctuation, register, style, and grammar myths
• Seven essay modes plus timed AP-style writing
• MLA research papers and the annotated bibliography
• SAT and ACT reading, vocabulary, and grammar preparation
• Speech types, debate, media literacy, and speaking about faith

What your student will be able to do

• Diagram a sentence and use the structure to find modifier and parallelism errors
• Read a text through more than one critical lens and defend the choice
• Write a timed analytical essay under exam conditions
• Build an annotated bibliography and judge sources with the CRAAP test
• Integrate quotations into an argument without dropping or padding them
• Read archaic English in Shakespeare and the KJV with confidence

Scope and sequence

All 15 units of English Language Arts for Grade 10, in the order they are taught.

Every lesson, by title

All 180 lesson titles are listed here — nothing is withheld until you download. Open a unit to read its contents.

One whole lesson, exactly as it comes

This is a real lesson taken from the middle of the course — the teaching text, the practice, the homework, and the first three quiz questions with their answers. It is not a marketing excerpt.

What you will need

Drawn from the materials named across all 180 lessons of this course. Most families already own most of it.