What each grade learns › Grade 12 › English

What does a 12th grader learn in English and Reading?

The usual course: English 12: British Literature, one full year, 1 credit.

Your child reads major British works in order, from Beowulf and Chaucer through Shakespeare, the Romantics, the Victorians, and modern writers. Along the way they practice close reading, literary analysis, research, argument, and college-le

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36 weeks, 72 lessons, in 9 units. Every school and state does it a little differently, so think of this as the usual path.

Close Reading and Anglo-Saxon Literature

Students learn how the British literary timeline is organized, practice annotating, and study early English epic and elegy, which builds the close-reading habits used all year.

Standards: Common Core RL.11-12.1-6, W.11-12.1, L.11-12.5
  1. Week 1: The big picture: a timeline of British literatureAt home: Draw a simple timeline on paper with the eras Anglo-Saxon, Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, Victorian, and Modern.
  2. Week 1: Close reading: how to annotate a textAt home: Have your teen annotate a short news article, underlining key claims and writing questions in the margin.
  3. Week 2: Anglo-Saxon England and oral storytellingAt home: Tell a family story aloud from memory, then discuss what changes each time it is retold.
  4. Week 2: Beowulf: the epic hero and the monster GrendelAt home: Ask your teen to name a modern hero who resembles Beowulf and explain why.
  5. Week 3: Alliteration, kennings, and caesura in Old English verseAt home: Invent two kennings, such as 'whale-road' for ocean, for everyday objects in your home.
  6. Week 3: Beowulf: the dragon fight and heroic valuesAt home: Discuss whether Beowulf's last choice was brave or foolish, and have your teen defend a view.
  7. Week 4: The Wanderer and The Seafarer: elegy and themeAt home: Read a short excerpt together and name the mood it creates and the words that create it.
  8. Week 4: Writing a strong literary thesis statementAt home: Write one arguable sentence about a favorite movie's main character, then improve it to make it more specific.

Medieval England

Students explore Middle English, Chaucer, Arthurian romance, and early drama to see how storytelling, society, and language changed after 1066.

Standards: Common Core RL.11-12.2-6, L.11-12.4, L.11-12.5
  1. Week 5: The Norman Conquest and the birth of Middle EnglishAt home: Look up five English words with French roots, such as 'beef' and 'pork', and compare them to their Old English cousins.
  2. Week 5: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and the frame narrativeAt home: Imagine a road trip where each traveler tells a story, and decide who your family members would be.
  3. Week 6: Reading Middle English: the General PrologueAt home: Read the first lines aloud in a modern translation, then try the original spelling and compare the sounds.
  4. Week 6: Characterization and satire in Chaucer's pilgrimsAt home: Write a three-sentence satirical portrait of a modern type of person, such as an influencer.
  5. Week 7: The Wife of Bath's Tale: theme and perspectiveAt home: Discuss what the Wife of Bath thinks people truly want and whether it still applies today.
  6. Week 7: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: chivalry and testingAt home: List the qualities of a person with honor, then talk about which one is hardest to keep.
  7. Week 8: Malory and the Arthurian legendAt home: Have your teen name three modern stories that use Arthurian ideas, such as a quest or a round table of equals.
  8. Week 8: Medieval drama: Everyman and morality playsAt home: Ask which three things Everyman might take on his final journey, and what that says about values.

The English Renaissance: Poetry and Theater

Students study the sonnet, Renaissance ideas, and the Elizabethan stage to prepare for reading Shakespeare closely.

Standards: Common Core RL.11-12.4-5, W.11-12.2, L.11-12.5
  1. Week 9: The English Renaissance and humanismAt home: Discuss why people in the 1500s became newly interested in education, art, and individual potential.
  2. Week 9: The sonnet form: Petrarchan and ShakespeareanAt home: Count the lines in a sonnet together and mark the rhyme scheme using letters.
  3. Week 10: Marlowe and Raleigh: the pastoral poem and its replyAt home: Read 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love' and write a two-line modern reply.
  4. Week 10: Shakespeare's Sonnets 18 and 130: comparison and subversionAt home: Describe someone you love with honest, unusual comparisons instead of clichés.
  5. Week 11: Sonnet 116: the volta and the shape of an argumentAt home: Find the turn in the poem and say in your own words how the argument changes.
  6. Week 11: The Elizabethan theater and the GlobeAt home: Sketch a simple Globe stage layout and mark where groundlings and nobles would have stood.

Shakespeare's Macbeth

Students read one complete tragedy closely, act by act, and learn blank verse, tragic structure, and how to plan an essay about it.

Standards: Common Core RL.11-12.1-7, W.11-12.9, SL.11-12.1
  1. Week 12: Writing a poetry analysis paragraph with evidenceAt home: Write a short paragraph about a favorite song lyric, with a claim, a quotation, and an explanation.
  2. Week 12: Macbeth: Jacobean context and the witches (Act 1)At home: Ask your teen why people in 1606 might have taken witches and prophecies seriously.
  3. Week 13: Ambition and Lady Macbeth (Act 1)At home: Discuss when ambition is healthy and when it becomes dangerous.
  4. Week 13: Blank verse and iambic pentameterAt home: Tap out the rhythm of a line spoken aloud: da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM.
  5. Week 14: Guilt and the murder of Duncan (Act 2)At home: Talk about how the play shows guilt through sound and imagery, such as the knocking.
  6. Week 14: Banquo, power, and tyranny (Act 3)At home: Discuss how fear can push a leader to make worse and worse decisions.
  7. Week 15: Prophecy and equivocation (Act 4)At home: Make up a statement with a double meaning, like the apparitions' promises, and see if the family can spot it.
  8. Week 15: Sleepwalking, blood, and darkness: imagery in Act 5At home: List the recurring images in the play and what each one seems to symbolize.
  9. Week 16: The tragic hero and Aristotle's idea of tragedyAt home: Compare Macbeth to a hero from a modern film who falls because of a flaw.
  10. Week 16: Fate versus free will: planning a Macbeth essayAt home: Make a simple outline with a thesis and three pieces of textual evidence from the play.

17th and 18th Century Voices

Students move through metaphysical poetry, Milton's epic, Restoration prose, and Enlightenment satire to see how writers argue about faith, reason, and society.

Standards: Common Core RL.11-12.4-6, RI.11-12.6, W.11-12.1
  1. Week 17: The metaphysical poets: Donne and the conceitAt home: Come up with an extended comparison, like Donne's compass, to describe a close friendship.
  2. Week 17: Carpe diem: Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress'At home: Break the poem into its three-part argument and summarize each part in one sentence.
  3. Week 18: Milton's Paradise Lost: the epic invocation and SatanAt home: Discuss why a villain can be a compelling character and how Milton makes him so.
  4. Week 18: Pepys's diary and the Great Fire of LondonAt home: Write a short diary entry about an ordinary event today in Pepys's observant style.
  5. Week 19: Swift's 'A Modest Proposal': irony and satireAt home: Talk about how the essay uses a shocking tone to expose a real problem, without taking it literally.
  6. Week 19: Pope and the heroic coupletAt home: Write a rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter about something ordinary at home.

The Romantic Era

Students study poets and a novelist who valued nature, emotion, and imagination, learning to analyze imagery, tone, and theme in lyric poetry.

Standards: Common Core RL.11-12.1-6, RL.11-12.9, W.11-12.2
  1. Week 20: Johnson's Dictionary and the rise of the essayAt home: Write your own funny or thoughtful definition for a common word, in Johnson's style.
  2. Week 20: Romanticism: nature, emotion, and imaginationAt home: Spend ten minutes outdoors, then write what you noticed and felt in a few sentences.
  3. Week 21: Blake's Songs of Innocence and ExperienceAt home: Compare 'The Lamb' and 'The Tyger' and talk about what each shows about the world.
  4. Week 21: Wordsworth and the language of ordinary peopleAt home: Describe a memory of a place in plain, honest language, as Wordsworth recommended.
  5. Week 22: Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient MarinerAt home: Retell the story in five sentences and name the moral the Mariner learns.
  6. Week 22: Byron and the Byronic heroAt home: List traits of a brooding, rebellious hero and name one in a modern book or film.
  7. Week 23: Shelley's 'Ozymandias' and the fall of powerAt home: Discuss what 'Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair' means and how it is ironic.
  8. Week 23: Keats: 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and negative capabilityAt home: Look closely at a photo of an object and write what story it might silently hold.

The Victorian Age

Students read Victorian poetry, novels, and drama that respond to industry, empire, class, and changing roles, and learn how voice and irony shape meaning.

Standards: Common Core RL.11-12.3-7, W.11-12.9, L.11-12.3
  1. Week 24: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Gothic fiction and responsibilityAt home: Talk about whether inventors are responsible for how their creations are used.
  2. Week 24: The Victorian Age: industry, empire, and reformAt home: Discuss how one invention, like the railway, changed everyday life in the 1800s.
  3. Week 25: Dickens and social criticism: Hard TimesAt home: Describe a school or workplace rule today that Dickens might have mocked.
  4. Week 25: Jane Eyre: narrative voice and independenceAt home: Read a short passage aloud and talk about how the first-person voice makes you trust Jane.
  5. Week 26: Tennyson's 'Ulysses' and the dramatic monologueAt home: Speak aloud as a character from a story you know, in a short monologue.
  6. Week 26: Browning's 'My Last Duchess': the unreliable speakerAt home: Talk about what the Duke reveals about himself without meaning to.
  7. Week 27: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina RossettiAt home: Compare how two poems describe love and decide which tone feels more personal.
  8. Week 27: Hopkins's 'Pied Beauty' and sprung rhythmAt home: Read the poem aloud and clap its uneven, energetic beat.
  9. Week 28: Hardy and irony: 'The Man He Killed'At home: Discuss how the poem uses simple language to make a serious point about war.
  10. Week 28: Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest: satire and witAt home: Write a witty one-line saying that pokes fun at a social habit, in Wilde's style.

Modern and Contemporary British Literature

Students study how war, empire's end, and modern life changed British writing, from modernist experiments to contemporary poetry and essays.

Standards: Common Core RL.11-12.2-6, RI.11-12.5-6, W.11-12.3
  1. Week 29: Modernism: World War I and the break from traditionAt home: Discuss why writers might abandon traditional forms after a devastating war.
  2. Week 29: The war poets: Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est'At home: Find three sensory images in the poem and discuss how they challenge the idea of glory.
  3. Week 30: Yeats and 'The Second Coming': symbol and uneaseAt home: Talk about what the falcon and the falconer might symbolize in the poem.
  4. Week 30: Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'At home: Write down a time you hesitated to speak up, then discuss why it was hard.
  5. Week 31: Woolf and stream of consciousness: Mrs DallowayAt home: Write a one-minute stream of thoughts during an ordinary activity without stopping.
  6. Week 31: Orwell's 'Shooting an Elephant': essay and perspectiveAt home: Discuss how the writer explains a decision he regrets and what the essay says about pressure.
  7. Week 32: Postwar poetry: Larkin and the plain styleAt home: Notice how everyday objects or scenes appear in a poem and what they suggest.
  8. Week 32: Contemporary British voices: Carol Ann Duffy's 'Valentine'At home: Discuss how an unexpected image, like an onion, can change what a poem says about love.

Research, Argument, and College Writing

Students apply what they have read to research, argument, revision, personal writing, and discussion, preparing for college coursework.

Standards: Common Core W.11-12.1, W.11-12.3-8, L.11-12.1-3, SL.11-12.1-4
  1. Week 33: Forming a research question about a literary topicAt home: Turn a curiosity about a book you have read into one focused 'how' or 'why' question.
  2. Week 33: Finding and evaluating credible sourcesAt home: Compare two websites on the same author and decide which is more reliable and why.
  3. Week 34: Taking notes and avoiding plagiarismAt home: Read a paragraph and write its main idea in your own words, then compare it to the original.
  4. Week 34: Integrating quotations and citing in MLA formatAt home: Practice introducing a short quotation with a signal phrase and adding a parenthetical citation.
  5. Week 35: Building an argument: claims, evidence, and counterclaimsAt home: Pick a debate topic at home and give one claim, one reason, and one fair counterpoint.
  6. Week 35: Revising for style: syntax and sentence varietyAt home: Rewrite a paragraph so it uses a mix of short and long sentences.
  7. Week 36: Writing a personal narrative for college applicationsAt home: Brainstorm three small moments from your life that reveal something about who you are.
  8. Week 36: Discussing and presenting literary ideasAt home: Give a two-minute talk to the family about your favorite work this year and why it matters.

Written with AI from what schools usually teach (like the Common Core for math and NGSS for science). Check your state's standards if you need to match them.