Queens vs Epi Kardia English

We are using Epi Kardia’s high school essay program and we love it – we are using it to refresh the essay skills and it is so well laid out, that we don’t have any prep – just a grat rubric to work from to grade it.  I wanted them to do an essay refresher. but it stands alone for students who are brand new to essays as well, and I highly recommend it.  I also have some of their other things and just love them.

Hello, It is supposed to be the main part of a one year credit course.  It is of course composition covering narrative, descriptive, expository, persuasive and compare/contrast type essays.  There is also the opportunity to try for an honors essay.  It is recommended that you teach grammar and spelling through the correcting of the essays.  They recommend a good English handbook, and then adding literature studies to round out the credit course.  They recommend 1-2 books a semester to read and discuss -they highly recommend How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler as the first book to be read.  My daughers had already read this when they started the essay course, so we just jumped in with other literature, and they are reading books, and a literature textbook – the literature textbook (we are using Abeka) is useful because it has so many short stories and excellent poems.  We do not use it as a textbook, we use it as a compendium of excellent poems and stories – we pick and choose among them.  My daughters love reading and so for them it does not seem like a lot of work.  The writers of the essay course say you can teach the course concurrently with American, World or British literature or with any history course.

We have found the course to be simple to implement, it is written to the student.  Each essay type has a recommended time frame for completion and thorough step by step instructions for the student to follow.  There is minimal teacher prep, which is helpful.  There are sample essay for your students to see so as to recognize what the essay should look like, and there are excellent rubrics, and editing checklist and some samples of graded work to help with that.  I can highly recommend this to anyone.  We also have the Reearch paper course, but have not used it yet – however it is equally excellent and I am thrilled with it.  I feel that with the very thorough step by step instructions my daughters can go off and do their daily work with minimal involvement from me, then I can advise, correct and when the final draft is ready I can use the rubric to grade it.  I sent the girls first essay to my BIL who is a University English Professor in the UK, he was highly impressed with the calibre of work they produced, and thought it was outstanding for a high school student – so that tells me the course works.

I hope that answers your questions, feel free to ask again if you need more information.  I have another couple of essay programs, but this one was and is by far the best I have seen, and my daughters love doing it, which is half the battle.  Linda

Hi again – I don’t use CM methods exclusively, though for history and literarature I do most of the time.  The lit textbook I use purely because it has outstanding stories, poetry etc in it – short stories and poetry are important to read in high school, so along with the single books they read, it is a nice way to round out the course.  We also use other poetry books and short story books – but the literature book shows great examples of the various literary elements I wanted the girls to know.  I also use a history text book to use as a timeline time book to keep us on track with the highlights of US History.  I am a history major in British and European, but don’t know much about US history, so I wanted the textbook as a guide – we actually use Notgrass for the main book.

I also have EpiKardia’s The Art of Public Speaking which looks wonderful – have not used it but plan to in the next months.  It is set up in a similar way to the Essay book and is just as thorough – so it might be a good addition if you want that subject area covered.

Good luck with it all – and don’t worry if you are not pure CM.  A few of us on here are using texts in different ways for our high school students.  Go ahead and use the textbook as you see fit – some of them are really excellent.

Linda