How long for Literature Guides?

[sabrina_cody]

I don’t really plan to do a full core next year with my 6th grader but would love to add in some Literature Guides to our existing curriculum. How many weeks should I realistically plan for one book? I’m specifically thinking of D’Aulaires’ Greek Myths and maybe Trojan War or something else that would go with Ancient History.

[klwalukas]

Trojan War is scheduled for 10 weeks. Some take more or less than that, but since there are usually 4 scheduled per year with about 36 weeks, you can estimate an average of about 9 weeks per book. (In the 6th grade lit package, all the books get about 10 weeks, except Bronze Bow gets about 5 weeks.)
HTH!

[momgineer]

Also, it might help to know that MP wrote the Greek Myths guide as a classical studies guide and not literature. It is a much different style guide. It’s point is to learn the stories and characters in the Greek Myths so students are familiar when they encounter those characters in their ancient history and literature studies later on. They guide focuses on drilling and retention of key facts and figures. The literature guides are more about learning the vocabulary and reading/writing skills and focus more on questions that help the student “read between the lines” and write out complex thoughts.
So, while Greek Myths is a wonderful guide and very useful for leading the student through the text and helping them retain key information, it is not written to be a study of great quality literature like the MP literature guides are.
If you are looking for other books to add to ancient studies you could consider Bronze Bow which is set in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus. Also, MP sells a child’s version of Aeneid but I don’t think they have a guide for it.

[sabrina_cody]

Thanks for that info! I will plan to do Greek Myths in 9-10 weeks as a “unit study” and just do other read alouds without Guides during that time so it’s not too overwhelming. I may use some Guides from Veritas too although I know they are a bit different

[Michael]

How many weeks should I realistically plan for one book?

Good afternoon,

If it helps, you can see how many weeks we schedule for each of our literature guides on this page. We have plans for all the literature guides in our core packages and some of the other guides.

HTH!