Are you homeschooling and looking for a literature, grammar and writing course all in one?
Disclosure: I received access to this course to review it.
Lightning Literature
Lightning Literature is from Hewitt Learning and comes for all ages from Grade 1 – Highschool. We tried out Grade 4. It’s first and foremost a literature course but includes grammar and writing as well.
It’s a open and go course once you’ve purchased the necessary books that go with it. You can buy as a group from the website, purchase yourself or use your local library and/or thrift store which is what we did.
The course comes with a student and teacher guide. You can buy hardcopies or ebooks. We used ebooks and printed as necessary instead of printing the whole book at once. I just access the teacher’s guide when necessary online.
Each day (1-4) you read, then answer some questions about the book (reading comprehension). There is your grammar lesson for the day and grammar practice. Finally there is a writing assignment which is only shown in the teacher’s guide. If you homeschool 5 days a week, you can either skip LL for that day or include some more book discussion or enrichment activities.
Our Thoughts
The grade four books have been great so far. We had trouble finding one of the books as it was out of print everywhere I looked but I found someone reading it online on YouTube. All the US homeschoolers I see bought the book from Thrift Books but shipping is too high here in Canada for that. We already owned a few of the books and a few of them I’ve read myself. You can see booklists on the website.
My daughter mostly loves it. Some books she likes more than others of course but that’s to be expected. We didn’t finish the first book because it was too upsetting for her (she’s very sensitive.) I like that it introduces her to a variety of books.
I like that I don’t have to come up with separate comprehension questions for each book we do, or decide which order to teach grammar. Although I do miss picking my own books for her to use. I probably won’t use LL again next year but mostly because our budget is SUPER small. LL is not expensive if you get a hold of the books yourself but we mostly create our own curriculum to save money. I do recommend it to those who want an open and go ELA curriculum.
How We Use It
I read the books out loud to her but it’s designed so she can read them herself too. You can do it however you want. My daughter has ADHD and needs me to keep her focused so we do it together.
We chose not to do the writing component, mostly because she needs to catch up on her penmanship and spelling first but also because it took too long. If you want to do the writing, allow at least 1 hour to do all of Lightning Literature each day. I’d estimate 20 for reading, 20 for literature questions and grammar and 20 for writing. This would probably increase in higher grades.
The grammar builds on the year before so if you have never used Lightning Literature like us, you might find your child is either struggling with the grammar or way ahead on it. I recommend choosing the grade your child most closely matches in her ELA/literacy work in general. If the grammar is too hard, add in some extra practice. If it’s too easy it will be review. We didn’t have too much trouble with this. It was spot on. The grammar DOES include diagramming which we chose to skip.
Since we don’t do the writing and I read the books with her and am pretty good at grammar, we don’t use the teacher’s guide much. However it does include the writing assignments, comprehension answers and grammar answers if you need that.
I Made a Video
I made a video on my YouTube Channel Bailey Academy with a walkthrough of the program. This was before I started using it so it’s not a review. However if you want to see more about the program and how it looks inside, you might want to check it out.
Check out Hewitt Learning for more on Lightning Literature.
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