Focus: Unit 4, The Iliad, the Odyssey, and Other Greek Stories, examines ancient Greece through epic stories and myths where heroes face enormous and frightening challenges and meet those challenges with bravery and ingenuity. Students will focus on the literary skills of character perspective and motivations, and linear and non-linear sequences of events. They will explore how myths are shaped by, and how they communicate, the values of a particular culture at a specific point in time.
To audiences of the day, these myths and epics were exciting and culturally relevant entertainment. To today’s students, the works present an opportunity to engage with a culture and society whose values are sometimes strange, and sometimes universal. By seeing what the ancient Greeks valued in their society and what they thought about their world, students will be prompted to reflect upon their own values and standards of behavior.
This unit uses the following Core Knowledge Core Classics: The Iliad and the Odyssey, ISBN 978-1-68380-615-8, copyright © 2020 Core Knowledge; and Realms of Gold, ISBN 978-1-890517-22-9, copyright © 2000 Core Knowledge.
Number of Lessons: 14
Lesson Time: 90 minutes. Each lesson may be divided into shorter segments.
Additional Search Terms: narrator • perspective • symbol • theme • resolution • point of view • pronoun cases • sentence types • mythology • epic • prefix • suffix
