Week 15 Jeopardy!

For our last week this semester, we played Lord of the Rings Jeopardy!

We missed the Claridges, Corbin and Jared.

The teams were:
Team 1 Adam vs
Team 2 Noah, Emmalyn, Elliot and Katie.

They were pretty well matched, at 6600 and 6700 when we went into final Jeopardy.   My final Jeopardy question could have accepted Adam's answer, but we were pretty much out of time. Team 1 Adam wagered 6000, and Team 2 wagered 100.

It was this:

Answer:  It is what Tolkien says that this tale is mainly concerned with.

Question:  What is death and immortality?

I got it from this quote:  

                                "But I should say, if asked, the tale is not really about Power and Dominion: that only sets the wheels going; it is about Death and the desire for deathlessness. Which is hardly more than to say it is a tale written by a Man!" “It is mainly concerned with Death, and Immortality; and the 'escapes': serial longevity, and hoarding memory." 

Adam gave the answer of "What is the Catholic Bible?" Based on the earlier quote I've posted twice before about the LOTR being a Catholic work, unconsciously at first, and consciously in the revision. .  

Team 2 gave "Good vs Evil" 

Good answer, that is a huge theme of the series.  

At the end of class, I called the game a tie because I felt I could accept Adam's answer. But if I really accepted it, Adam would win with 12,600...  I wouldn't correct him if he said he won.  ;)   

Week 12, 13 and 14

I was gone for week 12, but Teacher Lisa lead the discussion on The Return of the King.  They talked about how Aragorn grew as a leader, and why Tolkien had the Scourging of the Shire at the end.  (Very different from the movie ending.)

I have been looking forward to week 13 all semester!  I was so excited to cover the Christian archetypes and symbolism in the LOTR. While Tolkien said he hated allegory, he filled the books with Catholic, and also universal Christian themes, motifs, symbols and archetypes.  Remember this quote from an earlier post?

"The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like "religion", to cults or practices, in the Imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism."

There are 4 or 5 Christ archetypes.  Three in the Prophet, Priest and King, Gandalf, Frodo and Aragorn respectively. They all sacrifice everything, walk through a valley of shadow and death, and go through a symbolic death and resurrection.  All three are known by more than one name.

Gandalf, like a prophet, warns, mentors and helps. Frodo dedicates his life to service.  Aragorn is the long looked for king that returns with incredible powers of healing.  They are all compassionate and merciful.

Frodo receives a wound in is side on Weathertop.

Tom Bombidil isn't a significant Christ archetype, but breaks down the walls and sets prisoner free twice with song.

Sam is Christ as a faithful and loyal servant. He is also like Simon who carried the cross when Christ stumbled and fell.   Sam is the meek that inherits the earth (Shire).

There are three Satan archetypes, the balrog, the Witch King and Sauron. Gollum and Saruman play a Judas Iscariot archetype.  Smeagol is also a Cain archetype and also represents mankind enslaved to sin.  The Mouth of Sauron is an Anti-Christ archetype.

Lembas bread and Ent drafts are like communion, or the sacrament.

Arwen, as the bride of Aragorn is like the Church at the second coming. Eowyn is like the Church, victoriously fighting against the powers of Satan.

Boromir is like Sampson.  He was the hope of a nation, who won many battle and then falls hard.  He is redeemed in the end before he dies.

Faramir is like John the Baptist.  He is the Steward that prepares the way for the King to enter His city.

Theoden is mankind who serves humbly and faithful to the end.

Denethor is mankind deceived through Pride and fails in the end.

Elves are like angel and orcs, as fallen elves, are like fallen angels or demons.

The Nazgul and the Army of the Dead are inbetween life and death and in a kind of Purgatory.

Galadriel and Celeborn are like Mary and Joseph.  She is kind, helpful and full of life giving advice.  Her husband isn't as notable as she is.

The water in Lothlorien is like the Living Water.

Lothlorien is like a Garden of Eden

Numenor is like a Tower of Babel or Old Jerusalem.

Minis Tirith is Jerusalem and then the new Jerusalem.

The battle of Pelanor Fields is like Armageddon and the battle at the Black Gate is like the final battle.

Sailing out of the Gray Havens is like translation.

Last of all, the ring represents sin.  Frodo carried it to the fires of Mt Doom to destroyed it on a significant day in the Catholic faith, March 25, the Feast of Annunciation.


For Week 14 we had an awesome simulation.  I was impressed at the leadership that was shown and the insight that these students showed about the ploys the Adversary uses.  Great job everyone!

Our last week we will be playing Jeopardy, so brush up on your Lord of the Rings trivia!!

Week 11

We started discussing Return of the King this week.  

We talked about the theme of sacrifice and all the characters that either are sacrificed or make significant sacrifices.  We also talked about and how many times oaths are made, and what point, if any, Tolkien was trying to make. Whenever an author repeats something, they are usually trying to add to their overall message.  

I shared Tolkien's thoughts on writing a sequel and why he abandoned the project.  I also shared, here and there, the changes he made in the story, like having Aragorn and Eowyn get married. 

I mentioned little tidbits of info, like how Rosie and Sam are third cousins and that Aragorn is 88 at the end of the story.  I mistakenly said he died at 210, instead, he died at 198.  Numenoreans are given up to 210 years to live.  

I left them with research topics.  One is to look up Aragorn's family tree to see how he is related to Elrond, and if he does indeed have elf in him.  From what I remember, he does, and is a descendant of Beren and Luthien. 

Another was to look up what exactly the other rings did, and who made them.  

Researching something at home is one of the requirements for the award.  All the students have a requirement page, I hoped it was pretty easy to do.  Just showing a little effort is enough to pass off several of the things.  The 3 papers they need to write don't have to be lengthy.  A few sentences or one paragraph is enough.  Contact me with any questions on what is passable. 

I am going to be gone this week and the first week back from Christmas.  Teacher Lisa can pass things off. 

Merry Christmas and see you all on the 12th!  

Tolkien Society

For those die hard Tolkein fans, did you know that there is such thing as joining The Tolkien Society?
Just in case you are interested... 

Maille!

Maille is the correct spelling for chain mail.  "Chain" wasn't even a part of its name way back when.  Trey did a fabulous job demonstrating how to make maille and let everyone have a chance putting some rings on the little square Trey had already completed.  He had already spent 5 hrs making the square you see in the pictures.  Amazing!

We all saw how time consuming it is to make maille and were amazed at how heavy a little square piece of copper is.  Steele is even heavier!

Week 8 and 9

Week 8
How could we not go to an archery range when studying Lord of the Rings?  As appropriate, I brought along the red eye of Sauron for our bulls eye.  :D. But alas, I didn't take pictures!  I know!!  I did take this one from the Port Orchard group.

Week 9
We finished discussing the Two Towers.
I shared my new favorite quote.  I challenged everyone to use it next time they were at a buffet or during Thanksgiving dinner when great Aunt Martha placed something on the table they didn't recognize.

"What is it Precious?  Is it crumchable, is it tasty?"

We talked about the meaning of names, a couple more opposites I neglect to mention: 9 fellowship and 9 ring wraiths (duh) and putting Old Man Willow to sleep and waking up the ents.

I passed out discussion questions, choices for a paper writing assignment, and reminded them to have The Return of the King read by Dec 8.

This week Trey is going to have an awesome demo for us.

Opposites, Motifs and Themes

We started off seeing if anyone had any quotes he/she liked and wanted to share or even vocabulary words he/she noted.  I shared several quotes and words that I learned the meaning to.

I also shared a few Tolkien insults, my favorite is:

"The land must groan under their hated feet." 

We talked about how The Two Towers has a resurrection/ awakening theme.  Gandolf goes through a kind of resurrection, The Ents are awakened to fight, Theodon is released from his captive spell and Frodo awakens Smeagol to compete with Gollum.  The second book in a series like this is all about awakening armies and preparing to fight.  Catching Fire from The Hunger Games is a good example of this.

I asked if anyone noticed a motif that Tolkien gave to Gollum that is also foreshadowing.  I should have also hinted that this happens at the end of Two Towers, not the end of the series.  No one noticed, or wasn't there in the reading yet, so I asked them to watch for it.   A few days later, I noticed that Smeagol is given a different motif, and the combined personalities have another one.

Tolkien uses a lot of opposites in his series.
ents/trolls
orcs/elves
Gollum/Bilbo-Frodo
Birthday presents of the ring- Deagol to Smeagol/ Bilbo to Frodo
Boromir/Faramir
orc draft/ent draft
Galadriel/Shelob

I forgot to mention Old Man Willow/ Treebeard and the most obvious one of the 9 Fellowship/9 Ringwraiths

There are also opposites in the themes of the series.
Light/dark
pride/humility
fear/courage
fate/choice
death/immortality

This week we are going to an archery range!  If you have a bow and arrow, please send it with your student.  We will be leaving at the beginning of lunch and returning in time for 4th hour so please have a lunch ready.  The sooner we get out the door, the more time the students will have on the range.

They have another week to finish The Two Towers as we will discuss it the following week.  If they have finished Two Towers, get started on Return of the King. We will start discussing it on Dec 8th.

Week 6

I always have good intentions to update this blog on Friday.  Alas, it hasn't happened... yet.  

So last class we talked about who Tom Bombadil and Sauron are.  Who Sauron is is easliy found, but Tom is meant to be an enigma.  There are lots of ideas out there, and Adam gave a great explanation on who he could be.  

To understand who Sauron is, one has to consult the Silmarilion, the backstory for LOTR.  In this chart, the Valar are married as shown, but the descendency lines are for their creations, not offspring.    Gandolf's name here is Olorin.  

Here is a decent video about how it all started.  

I did not show either of these in class, but probably will this week just to make sure everyone gets it.  

We start discussing the Two Towers with week!  

Week 5!

We started class looking for symbols in the Fellowship of the Ring.  Tolkien said he didn't like allegories, but he also said,

"The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like "religion", to cults or practices, in the Imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism."

There is a ton of Christian symbolism in this series!  I tried to get their wheels turning about what Christian, and specifically Catholic, symbols that are in the story by having them say something they know about Catholic beliefs.  The mission of Jesus Christ, special celebration dates, and clergy was brought up, but not much else.  How about purgatory?  I told them to think about it and watch for anything as they read.  

I loved the rest of the discussion we had. I asked them to watch how Aragorn develops as a leader, as he made some blunders and had some good moments.  

For this week, hopefully they are researching who is Tom Bombadil and who is Sauron. Also, they can be researching the meaning of names in the LOTR.  (hint: There is a pdf of a document Tolkien wrote about it.) We will discuss what they find this week. Next week, have the Two Towers read for discussion.

The Fellowship of the Ring

We started discussion of the Fellowship of the Ring.

We talked about all the main and sub themes that Tolkien used.

We described all the races of middle earth (well, the good ones) and which one the students would like to be.  The answers were interesting and very insightful.

I explained what motifs are by using the star motif Tolkien used for the elves.

For the next class, we will get more into the discussion questions.

I will also have their binder covers ready, yay!

We will start discussing the two towers in about 2 weeks.

We're Going on an Adventure! Or There and Back again.

To the Shire!  

The Brothers Greenhouses in Port Orchard has created a hobbit house replica and welcome people to come in costume and take pictures.  

Obviously, we had to go. 

I am not ashamed to say that there wasn't much of anything educational about this field trip.  It was pure fun and the results are even more fun.  

It is no contest that now the Literature class has the coolest binder covers ever.  ;)  

One Class to Rule Them All!

Just kidding!  All classes are GREAT at FILA, but a Lord of the Rings literature class just begs for it to be used.

I am so excited to lead this class!  I love fantasy and I love this story.  

For the first two weeks, we laid the groundwork necessary to study literature.  First, we learned about the life of JRR Tolkien.  The students were encouraged to annotate, and we learned about archetypes, in the spirit of this:

The 2nd week we learned about the hero's journey with this video:

And these diagrams: 

Then we went over some popular literary devices, like allegory, alliteration, foreshadowing, backstory and eucatastrophe (Tolkien's favorite).

This week we are going on a field trip to the Brother's Nursery in Gorst where they have a life size hobbit house!  The students are encouraged to wear any LOTR costume for pictures for their binder cover.  If they don't have anything, that's okay, I am bringing some cloaks and sword/bow props.

  

See you on Thursday!  

Almost done!

I can't believe we only have 2 weeks left!  I have really enjoyed this class and have learned so much.  Suzanne Collins is a genius. 

Week 9, March 19
We discussed the Singing Revolution and started discussing Catching Fire. 

Week 10, March 26
We discussed Catching Fire and mapped out the plot.  

Week 11,  April 9
We had a fabulous discussion on Mockingjay. 
 
Week 12, April 16
On the 16 We made a map using clues in the book of where we thought the districts were located in Panem.  It wasn't too serious of a class time, but we had fun.  We then compared our map with those found online. 

Week 13, April 23
We discussed the significance of The Hanging Tree song, assigned a bunch of archetypes to all the main characters, and mapped the plot. 

Week 14, April 30
We read the Captivity of Ignorance written by Eliza DeMille and assigned the paper of which Hunger Games character(s) are they most like.  Papers are due on the 14th.  We finished the time reading the meaning of the names of the characters in Mockingjay. 

Last 2 weeks:  
Week 15, May 7
We will read the horrible short story called the Lottery and discuss it.  We will wrap up discussion questions and map the hero journey of the series.

Week 16, May 14
We will play an awesome game of Jeopardy to see how much they remember about what we have covered.  There will be trivia, theme, vocab, symbol, name, district, and literary device questions. 

As I covered what we plan to do for the last two weeks, this will be the last post for this class. Have a fantastic summer and, oh, dear, I have to say it, may the odds be ever in your favor! 

Last 3 weeks summary

Happy Hunger Games and may the odds be ever in your favor!  

Week 6-  February 26

We had a great discussion.  Once of the questions that we spent a lot of time on was, "How does Panem resemble the US today?"  

A question that no one could really answer was,  "When is violence entertainment, and when is it just violence?"  I don't know what to think of the lack of discussion on that one.  Perhaps, you could discuss it as a family. 

I posed a rhetorical question, "What would you do all day without having to spend all your time on survival?"


Week 7-8  March 5 and 12

I had to leave town unexpectedly for a family emergency, so I moved up the movie day.  I had intended this 1 1/2 hr movie to take up one class time and all of lunch, but it got a late start so we finished it the following week.  The movie is a documentary called the Singing Revolution and is about how the Baltic States, particularly, Estonia, took back it's independence from the USSR in the late 80's and early 90's.     
We will discuss it next week and start discussing Catching Fire. 

Catching Up

Week 1 
The first class we went over the syllabus ( as mentioned in the last post ) and requirements to get the literature award(s).  I also summarized Theseus and the Minotaur, as that myth heavily influenced The Hunger Games series.  I handed out study questions and tried to inspire them to make annotations and take special notes on 3 of the characters. I asked them to look up the meaning of the main characters names, promising that their minds would be blown. 

Week 2
We watched several interviews with Suzanne Collins.  As a girl she loved reading mythology, and the story of Theseus especially haunted her.  She was horrified that a conquering king would remind them that he was in control by feeding them to the minotaur.  Killing children as punishment makes a significant impact. We also read Oliver DeMill'es paper about Hunger Games being a new freedom classic and talked about it.

Week 3 and 4
The first book, The Hunger Games was hopefully read or reread by this class.  We discussed the meaning of the names, talked about how the Capital keeps control and the use of propaganda.  I tried to inspire them again to annotate and take notes on the characters by sharing some of the things I wrote down.  I kept track of every reference to how the Capital kept control and the first signs of rebellion.  I looked for themes and symbols like references to birds.  I showed them my notes on the characters, so I could watch how characters and relationships evolve.  I asked if they noticed how strange it was for Suzanne Collins to mention that Katniss's birthday is May 8th  (take note of 1933 and 1945 and that the astrological sign is a bull.  Yup. Get it?)  and what the deal was with the moth.  There wasn't a ton of discussion on week 4. 

Week 5
We had some great discussions this week.  I asked how does Panem resemble America today.  We talked more about the symbolism and if Cinna was the one who used Katniss to start a rebellion.  I handed out study questions for Catching Fire and encouraged them to continue to take character notes and make annotations. 

Feb 26- This week we will do the literary analysis, map the plot, hero cycle and assign archetypes.  

Catching Fire should be read or reread by March 5.  

Happy Hunger Games, and may the odds be ever in your favor!

Last week we reviewed the class syllabus.  Scholars will need to read or reread the books for this class.  I gave a list of study questions and things to look up to consider as they read.  They also can take character notes and watch for the plot outline.  The first book needs to be read by Feb 5.  Catching Fire by the first class in March, and Mockingjay by the first class in April. 

Hi everyone! 
This is my first post, so hoping that everything works.  :) 

Your scholars will need to bring a binder the first day of class.  It can be a shared binder with another class if desired.  1 in should be good. 

Utopia will need to be read by the second class, Sept 18th.  Remember to encourage/remind/inspire your scholar to annotate, annotate, annotate! 

Setup Test

Testing Set up