Language Arts for Upper School Poetics & Progym - Level II Teaching Helps

Language Arts for Upper School Poetics & Progym levels continue the progymnasmata sequence begun in Bards and Poets. Each of these three high school levels will require reading at least one major literature classic along with poetry. Students will study grammar with sentence diagramming and will create Commonplace Books (Writer’s Journals). This series will focus on the skills from which flow expository and persuasive essays as well as poetry, grammar, vocabulary, word usage, and punctuation. It's assumed the student completing this course is simultaneously reading a large quantity of quality literature; particularly the classic works found in the Great Books. It is also assumed that these lessons are being completed in the context of a Christian home, where the student is reading the Bible and is being trained in Christian doctrine and practice.

Level I1 teaches maxim and chreia, serving as a catalyst for persuasive essays. Students will read Homer’s Odyssey. Level II teaches refutation, confirmation, commonplace, encomium, and invective, building toward argumentation, research, and bibliography skills. Students will look at material from differing viewpoints in their evaluation of characters in the Aeneid. They will also read Plutarch’s Lives (Volume I and II), Macbeth (including an annotated bibliography). In Level III, students will complete the last two stages of the progym (thesis and law) and write an in depth response to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Along with poetry of their choice, students will also read a number of C.S. Lewis essays from God in the Dock. With this extensive amount of reading and writing assignments, you might consider taking two years to complete either Progym II or III.