Family Style School: Hewitt Homeschooling Lightning Literature 8th Grade {A Review}

Hewitt Homeschooling is a company with a pretty great homeschooling philosophy.

Some highlights of their philosophy are to balance character, academics, work and service. They want to encourage homeschool, not school at home. They do this by personalizing your home education. Their services and products help develop a mind for a lifetime of use. They offer an array of materials for all ages of kids and a wealth of parental resources.

We were lucky enough to be able to review Eighth Grade Literature and Composition.

(We only received the Teacher Guide, the Student Guide, and the Student Workbook.)

About The Product:

Lightning Lit & Comp is a year long course. You can buy it as a pack with all the required reading books or buy the teacher guide ($20), the student guide ($25), and the student workbook ($25) all separately and get the books on your own. For us none of the books were hard to find and I had originally was going to check out the books from the library, but after starting I decided that they chose such great literature to use that I would be purchasing most, if not all of the books. I have been purchasing them as we get to them.

The Teacher’s Guide includes an explanation of the philosophy, a weekly lesson planner (which was a complete lifesaver for me!) and comprehension questions, discussion questions, the lessons and writing exercises, the workbook answers and additional teaching suggestions. Each chapter tells you which student guide and student workbook pages you will refer to. Here is a sample of Chapter 2.

The Student Guide has all the lessons broken down into categories such as:

Introduction
While you read (what to pay attention to, like the authors purpose, setting, imagery, etc.)
Vocabulary List
Comprehension Questions
Literary Lessons
Mini Lessons
Writing Exercises

Each Chapter also tells you which student workbook pages and teacher’s guide pages you will refer to. See a sample chapter of the student guide.

The Student Workbook is where students will actually practice the skills and concepts learned. They will do things like:

Composition skills
Thinking Skills
Grammar Review
There’s even optional puzzles and challenge workbook pages. (When I told Tommy these were optional he said, “Oh sure, make the fun pages optional.” He did choose to do them. They are thinks like crosswords and word searches.

See a Sample Chapter of the Student Workbook here.

A day/week in our life:

I can honestly say I would have had no idea how to use this without the weekly planning schedule. Each week he would have assigned reading, and most weeks he had to complete a certain number of activities. We used this just like the teacher’s guide said to. Absolutely no modifications. That is rare in my life, and fairly rare in the homeschool world in general.

Our thoughts and feelings:

I had my 15 year old son use this. Even though he is going into 10th grade I chose to have him start with the 8th grade program. We have never done a literature program other than reading books we choose. I am so glad I started with the 8th grade one, as these are very in depth. He doesn’t really enjoy reading very much. When he does read he prefers fiction. This program has helped him to enjoy reading. I believe it is because he is looking for something as he reads, like comparing culture or paying attention to the setting.

I do wish the weekly planning schedule was in the front of the student guide as well. I solved that problem by printing it from here and giving it to Tommy to check off. That way he could take charge and just know what he is supposed to do without waiting for me to figure it out.

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