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REPORT RESUME ED 013 807 24 TE 000 049 A CURRICULUM FOR ENGLISH, GRADE 2, UNITS 13-22. NEBRASKA UNIV., LINCOLN, CURRICULUM DEV. CTR. PUB DATE 66 CONTRACT OEC-2-10-119 EDRS PRICE MF-$0.50 HC NOT AVAILABLE FROM EDRS. 113P. DESCRIPTORS- *CURRICULUM GUIDES, *ENGLISH CURRICULUM, *ENGLISH INSTRUCTION, *GRADE 2, *LITERATURE, BIOGRAPHIES, CHILDRENS COOKS, COMPOSITION Si:ILLS (LITERARY), FABLES, FICTION, FOLKLORE COOKb, INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS, LANGUAGE, LITERARY ANALYSIS, MYTHCLOGY, ORAL READING, POETRY, NEBRASKA CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT CENTER IN THE NEBRASKA ENGLISH CURRICULUM FOR GRADE TOO, DEVELOPMENT CF A SENSE OF LANGUAGE USAGE AND OF NARRATIVE FORM AND PLOT IS STRESSED. SUCH CLAESIC FOLK TALES AS "LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD" AND "THE THREE BEARS" POINT OUT THE REPETITION OF PLOT STRUCTURE AND LANGUAGE FOUND IN STORIES. FUN WITH LANGUAGE FOMS IS ENCOURAGED THROUGH THE READING OF "JUST SO STORIES," AND AN UNDERSTANDING CF THE MYTH IS FURTHERED IN "THE GOLDEN TOUCH." THREE AESOP FABLES ARE PRESENTED FOR SIMPLE ANALYSIS OF COMMON DEVICES AND PATTERNS USED IN FABLES. WREOVER, SEVERAL. DR. SEUSS STORIES AND TOO ADVENTURE TALES- "BLAZE AND THE FOREST FIRE" AND "THE BEARS ON HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN"--HELP STUDENTS PERCEIVE BOTH REAL AND FANCIFUL VIEWS OF REALITY. "CROW BOY" AND "CAROLINE AND HER KETTLE NAMED MAUD" ILLUSTRATE NOW CHILDREN TODAY SHARE UNIVERSAL EXPERIENCES AND PROBLEMS WITH CHILDREN Cf DIFFERENT CULTURES AND DIFFERENT TIMES. AS CHILDREN BECOME FAMILIAR WITH LITERARY METHODS AND BEGIN TO RECOGNIZE RHYTHMIC AND PHONOLOGICAL PATTERNS IN COMPOSITIONS, THEY ARE ABLE TO CREATE STORIES OF THEIR OWN, USING AS MODELS THE LITERATURE READ IN CLASS. THIS MANUAL IS AVAILABLE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS, 215 NEBRASKA HALL, LINCOLN, NEBRASKA 68508. (SEE ALSO TE 000 048, TE 000 054, AND TE 000 055.) (.0) ACURRICULUM FOR ENGLISH Grade 2 Units 13-22 U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION& WELFARE OFFICE OF EDUCATION THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLYAS RECEIVED FROM THE PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING IT.POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS STATED DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT OFFICIALOFFICE OF EDUCATION POSITION OR POLICY. ACURRICULUM FOR ENGLISH Grade 2 Units 13-22 UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS LINCOLN T E boo Offq "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED T ERIC Ali ORGANIZATIONS OPERATING UNDER AGREEMENTS WITH THE U.S. OFFICE OF EDUCATION. FURTHER REPRODUCTION OUTSIDE THE ERIC SYSTEM REQUIRES PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT OWNER." Copyright © 1S66 by theUniversity of NebraskaPress All Rights Reserved The materials in thiscurriculum were created 13, funds supplied by The University of.Nebraska The Woods CharitableFund The Hill Family Foundation The United States Officeof Education (Contract No. OE-2-10419) Manufactured in theUnited States of America PREFACE The version of A Curriculum for English published here is an extension of the suggestions1 made in the Woods Curriculum Workshop of 1961; it is the result of a peculi- arly close collaboration between Nebraska classroom teachers and scholars from Nebraska and the country at large--a collaboration particularly intense between 1961 and1964.The curriculum covers the years of kindergar- ten through high school in detail and makes suggestions for the first year of college.It is not a panacea for present problems in the teaching of English; it is more like a half formed slave struggling to free itself from the stone.In some cases, the materials represent the state of the art in 1961; in some cases, that of 1967; many of the materials are as incomplete, as imperfect or simplistic ae the group which created them.They are offered to remind their audience that scholars can concern themselves with schools and that teachers can fulfill the demands of scholarship; they are also offered for whatever use they may have in the classroom.Since hundreds of people collaborated in the creation of these materials, no names are attached to them. They should remain anonymous and peregrine. The Nebraska Curriculum Development Center CONTENTS Introduction vii Unit 13: FolkTale. 1 Little Red Riding-Hood The Story of the Three Little Pigs The Story of The Three Bears Unit 14:Fanciful:1.9.1e. .11 And To Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street Unit 15: Animal Story. .19 Blaze and the Forest Fire Unit 16: Animal Story. .27 How the Whale Got His Throat The B eginning of the Armadillos The Cat That Walked by Himself Unit 17: Adventure Story . .37 The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins Unit 18: Adventure Story. .47 The Bears on Hemlock Mountain Unit 19: Myth. 55 The Golden Touch Unit 20: Fable. .63 The Hare and the Tortoise The Ant and the Grasshopper Unit 21: Other Lands and People. 75 Crow Boy Unit 22: Historical Fiction. .83 Caroline and Her Kettle Named Maud INTRODUCTION TO THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL PROGRAM The Nebraska elementaryprogram is divided into units; the units center in the study of literature, often literature readaloud, and include work in language and composition integralto such study.It may be in order to describe the premises of the program. I. Premises of the Program For at least twenty centuries, the best literature produced in the wesinrn world was presented orally to audiences ofmany ages and social levels. And if it is true that great audiences producegreat artists, then the audiences of such literature must have penetratedits meaning and been sensitive to its literary merit; theremust have been some route of interchange of inspiration continually open between writers and audiences. From this it does not follow that children who as yet do not read should be insensible to the attractions of fine litera- ture when it is appropriate to their level of intellect, imagination and rhythmic sense.Before a child is able to read, before he is able to cope with the only partially systematic English graphemic system, he has the need to come in contact with literature:if he cannot read, he can surely be read to--and this is a basic notion of the early units in this curriculum. We should surprise few teachers in saying that childrencan tell stories, oral tales, cycles of tales; theycan create their own literary culture so to speak, and they perhapscan do this best at the prompting and inspiration of excellent literary works.Storytelling, modeled and unmodeled, is thusa foundation activity suggested in this curriculum. The child's basically oral approach to literaturewill change as he masters reading skills, but hemust know and feel that these reading skills are worth learning. The elementary school program for language, literatureand composition should not be confused witha reading program.It is neither such a programnor a substitute for such a program. The development of methods for the teaching of reading is theproper con- cern of the reading expert and not of this study.Further linguistic research may lead to improvementsin methods for the teaching of reading; and, when sufficient researchdata indicates that these improvements have been made, they shouldbe synthesized in this curriculum. Our concern is with showing suchliterature as will make reading worth the effort, compositionan exercise in the imitation of excellence, and language studymore than a bore. vii The language, literature and compositionprogram for the elementary school is designed to teach students (1) to comprehendthe more frequent oral and written conventions of literature composed for young children--formal or generic conventions or simple rhetorical conventions; (2) to control these linguistic and literary conventionsin their own writing; and (3) to comprehend consciouslythe more frequent grammatical conventions which theycan handle in their speaking and writing. One who plans an elementary curriculum must first identifythe basic generalizations of the discipline, second,represent these gen- eralizations so that they can be taught to children, and third,build a spiral curriculum whichcovers those basic concepts in ever greater depth, thus developing a progressivelymore sophIsticated understand- ing of them. Once introduced ina relatively simple fashion, a concept will be treated somewhatmore intensively each time it appearsAll in all, the units of the curriculum intend toexpose the student repeat- edly to facts and ideas that hemay use in order to proceed inductively to general conclusions about the conventions of goodliterature. The child's sense of logic develops froman intuitive, anthropo- morphic apprehension to themore analytical apprehension of the junior high school student.The curriculum's sequence of literary works and of suggested analogous compositions endeavorsto display the same progress from the "mythic" and anthropomorphic to the realistic and the analytic, although this does not imply thatthe program at its upper levels ignores "fabulous" literature and comparablecompositional forms. (The basic attitudes toward thepsychology of children's literature, its relation to cognition, and theplace of its emergence in psychology upon which this curriculum is basedare set forth in the following books: Philippe Aries, L'Enfantet la vie familiale sous l'ancien '212Lne; Jan Van Den Berg, "Adults andChildren, " in The Changing Nature of Man: Northrup Frye, Design forLearning Ea modification of the generic theory used in this program].) II. The Units The mall-rials for the curriculumprogram in the elementary school consist of seventy specific units forthe various grade levels plus two packets of ancillary materials:Poetry for the Elementary Grades and Language Explorations for the ElementaryGrades.The units suggested for the elementary levelendeavor to arrange literary works in an articulatedsequence designed to develop the concepts essential to the literatureprogram in the spiral fashion mentioned viii above. Sixty-nine of the units are divided into nine groups or "pseudo- genres ": folk tales adventure stories other lands and people fanciful stories myth historical fiction animal stories fable biography Some of the selectionsin the curriculum could obviously be placed in more than one group, but such a classification serves the purposes of the curriculum in that it allows for stress on certain elements of stories, which in turn allows the sequential development of the principles of the program.