What’s the difference between a literature curriculum and a literature-based curriculum?
A literature curriculum teaches students to read and analyze literature as part of their English Language Arts program. Think of it as the part of English class where you read, discuss, and write about books. Exploring the World through Story is a literature curriculum. Specifically, it’s a world literature program that introduces students to works from around the globe, not just those from a single nation (“American literature,” “British literature”).
A literature-based curriculum teaches most or all of the academic subjects, including history and science, through the use of “living books”—that is, literature—rather than textbooks. Examples of lit-based curricula are Build Your Library, Bookshark, and Sonlight.
This post is part of TLDR (“Too long, didn’t read”), a series of very short articles that explain common homeschooling terms.
Copyright 2022 by Drew Campbell, PhD. All rights reserved.
Drew Campbell is the author of Living Memory, I Speak Latin, and Exploring the World through Story, and co-author, with Courtney Ostaff and Jennifer Naughton, of How to Homeschool the Kids You Have. Dr. Campbell is a veteran homeschooler and has worked as a classroom teacher, private school administrator, and independent tutor.