The Telemachos Guided Reading Editions of classic literature are designed to encourage educators to teach once again from the unabridged literary treasury of Western Civilization. Each edition provides students—unaccustomed to the sentence structure and vocabulary of novels written over a century ago—a path, appearing alongside the text, of specific questions that light their way toward understanding the story’s concrete details of plot, character, conflict, and imagery, details essential for all young readers to grasp when they enter, for the first time, into the worlds created by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, or Fyodor Dostoevsky.
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.
Sample essays in the supplementary materials highlight the evidence found in a tale, the associations that arise from it, and the relationships among those associations.
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.”
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 particular enjoy the structured data collection and alignment the organizers provide.
Clarity. Model. Repetition. Feedback
