REFORTRESUMES ED 013 1309 24 TE 000 051 A CURRICULUM FOR ENGLISH,GRADE 4, UNITS 34 -44. NEBRASKA UNIV., LINCOLN,CURRICULUM.DEV. CTR. PUB DATE 66 CONTRACT OEC--2-.10-119 EDRS PRICE MF-.$0.75 HC NOT AVAILABLE FROMEDRS. 153F. DESCRIPTORS-. *CURRICULU14GUIDES, *ENGLISHCURRICULUM, *ENGLISH INSTRUCTION, *GRADE 4,*LITERATURE; BIOGRAPHIES,CHILDRENS BOOKS; COMPOSITION SKILLS (LITERARY) , FABLES; FICTION, FOLKLORE BOOKS, INSTRUCTIOML MATERIALS,LANGUAGE, LITERARY ANALYSIS, MYTHOLOGY;POETRY; EPICS, NEBRASKACURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT CENTER GRADE FOUR OF THENEBRASKA ENGLISH CURRICULUMEXTENDS AND REINFORCES CONCEPTSINTRODUCED IN PREVIOUSGRADES. AMERICAN FOLK LITERATURE, WITH ITS HEROESEXEMPLIFYING HEROIC QUALITIES F THE CULTURE;IS STUDIED FOR ITSAPPEAL TO STUDENTS AND ITS USE OF DESCRIPTIVE AND FIGURATIVELANGUAGE. EFFECTIVE USE OF PHONOLOGICAL PATTERNS IS ILLUSTRATEDIN "CHARLOTTE'S WED" AND "ORIGHTYOF GRAND CANYON." IN"HOMER PRICE," FADULOUS ANDPLAUSIBLE ADVENTURES ARECONTRASTED AND PLOT PATTERN IS ANALYZEDTO POINT TOdARD THESTUDY C THE MODERN EPIC FORM, "HIAWATHA'S FASTING" AND THREE GREEKMYTHS EXPRESSING THE WAAL IDEALISMOF iW3 CULTURES AREUSED TO FURTHER CHILDREN'SKNOWLEDGE OF THE MYTH. THEREADING CF AESOP'S FABLES; STUDIED MOREANALYTICALLY HERE THAN IN PREVIOUS FABLE UNITS, LEADSTO THE CHILDREN'SDRAMATIZATIONS OF STORIES WITH MORALS. "A BROTHER FOR THEORFHELINES" POINTS OUT SIMILARITIES IN EMOTIONSAND BEHAVIOR OF CHILDRENOf DIFFERENT CULTURES. FINALLY,TVAD BIOGRAPHIES ---"WILLA"AND "LEIF THE LUCKY "- -ARE READ FOR THEIR SIMPLE ANDACCURATE PRESENTATION OF FACT, THEIR VIVIDCHARACTERIZATIONS; THEIR PORTRAYAL CF THE PASSAGE CFTIME, AND THEIR REVELATIONCr EVERY SIDE OF A SUBJECT.THIS MANUAL IS AVAILABLEFROM THE UNIVERSITY CF NEBRASKA PRESS,215 NEBRASKA HALL, LINCOLN, NEBRASKA 66508. (SEE ALSOTE 000 048, TE 000054, AND TE 000 055.) (JD) is A CURRICULUM FOR ENGLISH Grade 4 Units 34-44 U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION & WELFARE OFFICE OF EDUCATION THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM THE PERSON OR ON' NIZATION ORIGINATING IT.POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS ,STATED DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT OFFICIAL OFFICE OF EDUCATION POSITION OR POLICY. A CURRICULUM FOR ENGLISH Grade 4 Units 34-44 UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS LINCOLN 000 os-t t. "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS COPYRTHTED MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED TO ERICERIC AND ORGANIZATIONS OPERATING UNDER AGREEMENTS WITH THE U.S.OFFICE OF EDUCATION. FURTHER REPRODUCTION OUTSIDE THE ERIC SYSTEM REQUIRES PERMISSIONOF THE COPYRIGHT OWNER." Copyright ©1966 by the University of Nebraska Press All Rights Reserved The materials in this curriculum were created by funds supplied by The University of Nebraska The Woods Charitable Fund The Hill Family Foundation The United States Office of Education (Contract No. 0E-2-10.119) Manufactured in the United States of America PREFACE rf The version of A Curriculum for English published here is ar extension of the suggestions made in the Woods Curriculum Workshop of 1961; it is the result of a, Peculi- arly ciJse collaboration between Nebraska classroom teachers and scholars from Nebraska and the country at lare - -a collaboration particularly intense between 1961 and 1964.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 as 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 34:Folk Tale . to 1 Febold Feboldson r) Unit 35:Fanciful Tale 11 Charlotte's Web Unit 36:Animal Story. 25 Brighty of the Grand Canyon Unit 37: Adventure Story. 37 Homer Price Unit 38: Myth . 47 Hiawatha's Fasting Theseus and the Minotaur Ara,chne Phaeton and the Chariot of the Sun Unit 39: Fable The Fables of Aesop Unit 40: Other Lands and People . 81 A Brother for the Orphelines Unit 41: Historical Fiction . 89 Little House on the Prairie Unit 42: Historical Fiction 101 The Matchlock Gun Unit 43: Biography. 111 Willa Unit 44: Biography . .123 Leif the Lucky INTRODUCTION TO THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOLPROGRAM The Nebraska elementaryprogram is divided into units; the units center in tie study of literature, oftenliterature read aloud, and include work in language and compositionintegral to such study.It may be in order to describe the premises of theprogram. I. Premises of the Program For at least twenty centuries, the best literature producedin the western world was presented orally to audiencesof many ages and social levels. And if it is true that great audiencesproduce great artists, then the audiences of such literaturemust have penetrated its nit.3.aning and been sensitive to its literary merit;there must have been some route of interchange of inspiration continuallyopen between writers and audiences. From this it does not followthat 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 ableto 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 thatchildren can tell stories, oral tales, cycles of tales;they can create theirown literary culture so to speak, and they perhapscan do this best at the prompting and inspiration of excellent literaryworks.Storytelling, modeled and unmodeled, is thusa foundation activity suggested in this curriculum.The child's basically oral approach to literature will change as he masters reading skills, buthe must know and feel that these reading skills are worth learning. The elementary schoolprogram for language, literature and 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 isthe proper con- cern of the reading expert and not of this study.Further linguistic research may lead to improvements in methods forthe teaching of reading; and, when sufficient research data indicatesthat these improvements have been made, they should besynthesized 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 composition program for the elementary school is designed to teach students (1) to comprehend the 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 conventions in their own writing; and (3) to comprehend consciously the more frequent grammatical conventions which they can handle in their speaking and writing. One who plans an elementary curriculum must first identify the basic generalizations of the discipline, second, represent these gen- eralizations so that they can be taught to children, and third, build a spiral curriculum which covers those basic concepts in ever greater depth, thus developing a progressively more sophisticated understand- ing of them. Once introduced in a relatively simple fashion, a concept will be treated somewhat more intensively each time it appears.All in all, the units of the curriculum intend to expose the student repeat- edly to facts and ideas that he may use in order to proceed inductively to general conclusions about the conventions of good literature. The child's sense of logic develops from an intuitive, anthropo- morphic apprehension to the more analytical apprehension of the junior high school student.The curriculum's sequence of literary works and of suggested analogous compositions endeavors to display the same progress from the "mythic" and anthropomorphic to the realistic and the analytic, although this does not imply that the program at its upper levels ignores "fabulous" literature and comparable compositional forms.(The basic attitudes toward the psychology of children's literature, its relation to cognition, and the place of its emergence in psychology upon which this curriculum is based are set forth in the following books: Philippe Aries, L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien regime; Jan Van Den Berg, "Adults and Children, " in The Changing Nature of Man: Northrup Frye, Design for Learning F.: modification of the generic theory used in this program].) II. The Units The materials f©the curriculum program in the elementary school consist of severity specific units for the various grade levels plus two packets of ancillary materials: Poetry for the Elementary Grades and Language Explorations for the Elementary Grades.The units suggested for the elementary level endeavor to arrange literary works in