Grade 9
The Ancient World and Its Literature
The Ancient World and Its Literature
In our homeschool, we assign this reading in the ninth grade year. As with any of our courses, however, you could plug it in at any time in your four-year high-school cycle. The reading is mostly fairly challenging; most of the texts listed here are available in adapted or "younger readers'" editions, which you are also free to use if your student flounders. At this stage, though it's important to have a taste of the real thing, your foundational aim should be to acquaint your student with the great narratives and people of our Western historical and literary tradition.
Lesson planning suggestions here.
Reading List
As with all our materials, you are free to choose among many options, to create a highly-accelerated or a more leisurely course of study, to suit your student's aptitudes. Titles given as hyperlinks are available as free e-texts. Others will be available from the Abandon Hopefully bookstore.
1. Historical overview, or "spine" for the course
The Founding of Christendom, Warren Carroll
and/or
Foundations of Western Civilization, Thomas F.X. Noble (an excellent Teaching Company lecture series, available on DVD, or as audio-only; we used Parts I and II for ninth grade)
This reading is meant to provide historical context for all literary reading. Schedule one chapter and/or one lecture per week to ten days (there are twenty chapters in the Carroll book, for example, while the typical school year has approximately thirty-six weeks, so you can divide chapters, or space them out, and still have plenty of time to get through the book. If you use the Teaching Company lectures, you're looking at twenty-four lectures taking you from definitions of terms like "Western" and "civilization" through the early Church.)
Have your student take notes while reading or listening -- using the Teaching Company series is an excellent way to acclimate a student to college lectures and to teach note-taking from an aural source. Also require a brief written narration once the reading/listening is finished. This is not graded for grammar, style, spelling, etc, merely checked and given written feedback to stimulate the student to read or listen for a greater level of detail or accuracy. Think of narrations as a written conversation about books and ideas.
You may also opt to have your student keep a timeline notebook, detailing both historical events and literary developments. Some useful ideas here.
2. A Culture Speaks: Primary Sources and Literary Reading
You probably won't have time to read absolutely everything on this list, but it's here for you to pick and choose and customize. My own setup is to assign a chapter/lecture from the "spine" text or lecture series (or both) for each unit -- first civilizations, Greece, Rome, and so on -- and then use subsequent weeks for literary/primary-source reading and essay-writing (broad essay and research topics to follow). I also devote about eight weeks in the spring semester to a research paper of about ten pages, on some topic which grows out of all the year's reading. Depending on your student, you could opt to give some other kind of research project than a strictly written one, though the college-bound student really needs to become familiar with this kind of work.
First Civilizations/Origins of Story:
Great Myths of the World, Padraic Colum
(available online as Orpheus: Myths of the World. Note: the website, SacredTexts.com, is esoteric, to say the least. But it's nice to have online access to this book.)
The Bible
Game: Life in the Iron Age
Landmark The Pharoahs of Ancient Egypt, Elizabeth Payne (really well done. I've used it as a read-aloud for younger children, but it's a quick and fascinating read for a high-schooler)
The Cat of Bubastes, G.A. Henty
Mara, Daughter of the Nile, Eloise Jarvis McGraw
Cleopatra
optional/advanced alternative: Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare
Online Senet (Egyptian board game)
Ancient Israel:
Holy Bible, esp. 1&2 Chronicles, 1&2 Kings
David of Jerusalem/de Wohl
Greece:
The Iliad, Homer (who's he?)
in e-text form here and here
Also here (all versions are the Samuel Butler translation; some formats more readable)
Slightly easier-reading version here
Iliad Sparknotes
The Virtual Iliad
Timelines, maps, and other helpful background info
Iliad Study Guide
More useful background information
The Iliad Online Game
Troy Story: must see!
The Odyssey, Homer
Samuel Butler translation
Easier-reading version
Antigone, Sophocles
optional: more Greek drama:
Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
The Orestia, Aeschylus
Stories From the Greek Comedians
Stories From the Greek Tragedians
Greek mythology in modern literature:
Pygmalion, G.B. Shaw
Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis
Greek philosophy:
The Crito, Plato
Nicomachean Ethics, Plato (excerpts)
for comparison's sake:
The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis
history:
Histories, Herodotus
Rome:
The Aeneid, Vergil
(more about The Aeneid, from an AP test-prep site)
Lives, Plutarch
History of Rome, Livy
Stories From Livy
Hannibal
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare (Check out No Fear Shakespeare and other links at the Grade 10 page)
Nero
Ides of April, Ray
Beyond the Desert Gate, Ray
Roman Baths Game
Sleuth Game: Death in Rome
Every Coin Tells a Story
Battlefield Academy: Roman Battle Strategy
Christian Era/Early Church:
The Spear/de Wohl
The Glorious Folly/de Wohl
The Story of the Last Days of Jerusalem
Helena/Waugh
The Living Wood/de Wohl
Confessions, Augustine
The Restless Flame, de Wohl
Citadel of God/de Wohl
Throne of the World/de Wohl
Many great ancient texts available as audio books at My Audio School.
**More details about reading and how to implement it will be added to this page shortly. Stay tuned!
Written component of the ninth-grade course
You can handle composition (also grammar) in several ways, depending on what kind of foundation your student has and what your own scheduling needs and inclinations are. In our own homeschool, I have devoted a summer semester strictly to grammar and composition, using Jensen's Grammar and Jensen's Format Writing as texts. If this kind of thing works for you, the summer between eighth and ninth grade seems a logical time to do a comp-and-grammar mini-course.
Alternatively, you can schedule one day a week for composition/grammar throughout any given school year, or all of them. I like Jensen's for the straightforwardness of the exercises (basically self-teaching) and the logical progress through basic writing skills, from sentence to paragraph to essay. If your student doesn't enter ninth grade already knowing how to write a 5-paragraph essay, this is the year to introduce that useful format.
Students should be writing daily as part of some aspect of their coursework; it doesn't always have to be English/humanities. Because this course is more or less at the center of your homeschooling, however, it is a good idea to have your student writing frequently on themes and topics which arise from the reading. If you can be interdisciplinary, tying together a history concept with a science one, for example, so much the better!
Informal daily writing ideas:
* a reading journal in which the student carries on a conversation with the writers/historical figures behind the reading
*historical stories based on the reading
*letters to historical figures or writers or literary characters; "letters home" from scenes of historical or literary events
*"newspaper" stories
Formal paper topics:
For each unit, I assign some kind of formal writing. Sometimes it's a "take-your-time" prepared essay; sometimes it's a "prepare-ahead" essay (student reads, makes notes, sketches out outlines) which is written with a time limit (an hour or ninety minutes). Typically it's a paper based on some theme which is traced through all the literature/history for the year.
For example:
the idea of the hero
friendship/kinds of love
the individual's role in society/in relation to the state
the individual and the supernatural (ie man's relationship with his God or gods)
It's also good to begin introducing the idea of literary devices as ways of manifesting these themes (as well as the broad action of a given story, or the assertions of a given philosopher). Have your student make note of images that recur, particular metaphors or similes, etc. Ninth grade is still early for sophisticated literary analysis, but it is appropriate, as students enter what, according to the classical trivium, is the rhetorical stage of their cognitive development, to have them begin to pay attention to rhetoric and the ways that it relates to larger ideas. In other words: notice that how someone says something is usually connected to what is being said.
Additional Reading:
How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler
My first child read this book at the beginning of her senior year. Hated it at first, then said it was coming with her to college, and other people would have to get their own copies. When my next child gets his own copy, my plan is to assign the first section (page numbers/chapter titles pending) at the beginning of ninth grade, or in the summer between eighth and ninth. Subsequent sections will form part of tenth, eleventh, and twelfth-grade reading.
Alternative course structures:
You could easily set up this course according to a Robinson-Curriculum schedule, with a reading list and the directive simply to write a short essay daily on a subject of the student's choice. I will be adding historically-appropriate science and math readings as I find them, to provide a more fully-integrated course of study (though of course you don't *have* to use every single reading!); also, I think I might provide the student with a list of essay prompts or writing ideas encouraging him to think about literary terms, themes, and so on. I'll add a list here soon, though SparkNotes is a surprisingly wonderful resource in this regard as well.
More to come!
