Course Overview

This course is designed to help you develop your writing, critical thinking and reading skills. All assignments and assessments are aligned to the English 9 Indiana Language Arts Standards, and each lesson will tell you which standard/s we are tackling. Assignments include reading, writing, and speaking; independent and collaborative work; and low-stakes and high-stakes writing assignments. All course work is designed to lead to a final capstone project, writing a children's picture book of a topic of the student's choice.

Organized to allow a flexible schedule, pacing guidelines and suggested benchmarks are provided to help students maximize their learning and earn their course credit in a timely way. Students can expect to interact with peers as well as to receive regular constructive feedback from their teachers. The course provides learning experiences focused on Indiana state literature and composition standards. 

This course is designed for first year high-school students.
Please note that Cooperative courses are restricted to teen-age students only; you must be under 19½ at the time of registration. An Independent version of the course is available by contacting the IUHS offices.

View a demo version of the course at https://iu.instructure.com/courses/2076627.

Prerequisite

None.

Required Materials

We don't have a textbook, because, quite simply, we don't need one. In an online classroom, we can find plenty of good information open-source (free), which saves you money and hassle. There are a handful of books--children's picture books, as a matter of fact!--that we will use in this course. You can find a list of them here. The class is aligned to Indiana's learning standards, so it's not just literature based. Actually, it's very skill-based. It will teach you how to do some new things and how to do some old things better...instead of just having you read literature and write about it, although (of course) we will do some of that, too!