
Free American Literature Resources
The resources in this post are from the one or two years in which I taught American Lit. The handouts were for my grade-level & Integrated 11th graders. When I first started teaching the class, it made sense to teach the class by time period, so that is how the materials below are organized. I drifted away from this in later years and I can post those materials when I come across them. For this particular year/blog post, I chose one representative piece for each time period so that we could move through the year at a good clip. I hope some of these materials are helpful to you.
Beginning of the Year/Introducing the Class
Intro to American Literature via Art handout/Note-taking Guide. After this activity, I had kids write me a letter about which time period they felt they would best connect with based on the activity.
Native Americans (The Sky Tree)
Puritans (Anne Bradstreet)
Rationalism (Ben Franklin)
Romanticism (Emerson)
To introduce Romanticism, I showed kids a clip of Legends of the Falls and went through the below handout.
Below are my handouts and activities for the rest of the unit.
Romanticism Jigsaw. You will need this HOLT Textbook:
Lines from Emerson's "Nature" (Introduction to the language/summary practice)
Emerson "Nature" Summary Sheet (Presentation Prep)
Emerson Nature Passages for Summary Presentations (Divided into 4 sections)
Thoreau Passages w. Vocabulary (You can use these in place of the Emerson passages above.)