Hewitt Homeschooling Review

This article is in collaboration with Hewitt Homeschooling.

If you have been involved with homeschooling for any length of time, you have undoubtedly heard Hewitt Homeschooling and their Lightning Literature program mentioned more than once.

Lightning Literature is available for junior and senior high (with programs for elementary grades coming soon!) and the Crew had the chance to work with almost all of these products.  Lightning Lit uses a combination of novels, plays, and autobiographies (full-length texts), and also essays, short stories and poetry, to teach composition, literature, and other language arts skills.

Hewitt Homeschooling believes that reading great literature, and then writing about it go hand in hand in preparing students for college-level reading and writing.

The junior high levels (Grade 7 or Grade 8) are full year courses, and include a student guide, a teacher guide, and a student workbook (this is the only consumable portion).

High school Lightning Lit programs are intended to be semester programs (though there are schedules available for using each over a full year) and there are a dozen options.

Four of these — on American and British literature of the Early to Mid 19th Century, or the Mid to Late 19th Century — are more introductory in terms of teaching how to analyze literature.  All of the high school levels consist of a Student Guide, and a short Teacher’s Guide.

The more advanced high school courses include everything from Shakespeare’s Tragedies or Comedies to American Christian authors, to World Lit.  These levels are more advanced primarily because the reading is more challenging.

As the Schoolhouse Crew found out, though, Lightning Literature is not the only product Hewitt Homeschooling has created.  A few parents of younger children had the chance to try out some of the elementary offerings.

A few Crew members received The Joy of Discovery, and Learning Objectives for Grades K-8.  The Joy of Discovery teaches the teacher about creating and using unit studies.  Learning Objectives allows you to track up to three students and their mastery of K-8 concepts.