Sample of the Reading List
Classical Writing Series, Animals and Heroes
Aesop’s Fables – additional selections
D’Aulaire, Greek Myths
Ludmila Zeman, Gilgamesh the King, The Revenge of Ishtar, and The Last Quest of Gilgamesh
Padraic Colum, A Children’s Homer
Linda Fang, Ch’i-Lin Purse’s A Collection of Ancient Chinese Stories
Roger Lancelyn Green, Tales Of Ancient Egypt
Ian Serraillier, Children’s Beowulf
Content Course Goals
- A working knowledge of the conventions and structure of fable
- Timelessness in a story
- Personification of animals
- Moral
- Analogy (creating analogies for fables)
- A working knowledge of the conventions and structure of mythology
- Credibility and the Suspension of Disbelief
- Etiological myth
- Cosmogony
- Oral Tradition and the transfer to written record
- Deus ex machina
- A working knowledge of the conventions and structure of narrative
- Standard plot structure and its variations (see also: analysis)
- In media res
- Character arc (development) or the lack thereof
- Genre study of the “Quest” narrative
- Thorough knowledge in the mythology of Greece and Rome
- Appreciation for historical context and cultural conventions in narrative (see also: analysis)
- Understanding the limits of a narrative as distinct from reader response and projection (see also: analysis)
Analysis Course Goals
- Comprehend, retain, and relate what is read in a narrative in a test environment
- Analyze a narrative scene According to Theon’s Six Elements of a narrative scene
- Distinguish the essential from the accidental in a narrative, and summarize larger portions into smaller
- Outline a narrative according to Acts and Scenes
- Map a plot according to the standard sequence of: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution (denouement), and recognize variations on this pattern
- Identify the purpose of a paragraph in a narrative
- Distinguish text supported ideas from personal ideas generated by the narrative
- Offer supporting evidence for answers and opinions from the text itself
- Distinguish the “moral” in narrative as well as fables
- Construct analogies for “the moral of the story” from both fables and narratives
- Draw conclusions about the culture that created such narratives from clues within the body of the literature read.
Composition Goals
- Copybook
- Proofing Marks
- Reading aloud
- Re-telling of a Fable
- Re-telling a Fable with amplification, particularly dialogue and description
- Learn to use a dictionary and study vocabulary
- 6-sentence shuffle
- Theon’s 6 components of a scene (Person, Place, Time, Action, Cause, Manner)
- Outline of a narrative according to scenes
- Re-telling a narrative scene either amplified or condensed
- Summarizing a paragraph in a single sentence
- Theon’s 4 types of paraphrase applied to the paragraph
- Creative narrative writing using vocabulary lists
- Creative writing of “analogy” stories
- Simple Sentence, Compound Parts, and Fragments
- Complex Sentence and Subordinate Conjunctions
- Reading quiz short answer form: 1) No pronouns without an antecedent in the answer; 2) Complete sentences; 3) Detailed versus general answers
- Punctuation for dialogue, compound, and complex sentences