The Telemachos Guided Reading Editions of classic literature make the unabridged classics accessible to the young readers of public, private, and home schools. Each edition provides students—unaccustomed to the sentence structure and vocabulary of novels written over a century ago—a path of specific questions, appearing alongside the text, that light their way as they enter, for the first time, into the worlds created by our masters of the literary arts.
From the first page of almost any classic work, young readers face an immediate challenge: how to figure out what's happening in the story. The questions accompanying the text focus their attention first on essential details of the plot. Unless they can follow the plot, readers are unlikely to grasp what makes the tale true, good, and beautiful.
Readers engage with the story's concrete details: the diction and imagery that reveal significant matters involving character and personality, that elaborate fundamental conflicts arising within the narrative, and that comprise the underlying evidence by which people make associations and draw conclusions as they read.
Each edition contains introductory resources mapping out a clear process for developing an interpretive analytical voice as the student prepares to make a cogent written argument.
Step-by-step instructions assist educators in developing in each of their students an analytical voice that is their own, neither repeating what they have been told by an instructor nor echoing artificial intelligence. Sample essays provide concrete models for imitation.
Young readers, unfamiliar with the practice of annotating parts of a text as they read, will find examples of annotation in these resources. Underlining or circling specific words or phrases as they answer the guided reading questions is the first step toward learning the skill of annotation.
Footnotes, rather than endnotes, elaborate historical, cultural, and literary matters as they crop up in the tale.
Reading classics being the most certain way to broaden a reader’s experiences with words, in almost every edition an extensive Glossary is provided.
Once you teach students what the “L2 Play” means, they can quickly discern between plot and an interpretive idea. When giving feedback to students who are merely re-telling the details of the story, you’ll just say, “I haven’t heard any L2: increase the quantity.”
Since all levels of students can learn the basic L1 and L2 plays, a classroom of mixed ability with each play works well. Arranging groups with a student just learning the L1 play with a more advanced student can be of benefit to both: the weaker seeing a more skilled execution of the play and the stronger being forced to explain why the play is successful builds both sets of memory networks.
The effectiveness of the “Plays” is their simplicity and clarity. They turn what seems for some a mysterious power of interpretation into an intellectual movement that is concrete and observable.
Yes, the interpretive strategies work with all texts – no need to change a system when approaching a poem or a cartoon or a nonfiction text.
Our primary graphic organizer, the Evidence-Association Chart, visualizes for students the basic movements of reading and provides the data for piecing together sentences, paragraphs, and whole essays. The Paragraph Chart focuses more precisely on four concrete plays that develop unity and coherence inside the paragraph. Our math/science students particularly enjoy the structured data collection and alignment the organizers provide.
Clarity. Model. Repetition. Feedback.
