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