Writing & Rhetoric Book 1 Student: Fable

Program Overview:  The Writing & Rhetoric series emphasizes fluent reading, careful listening, models for imitation, and progressive steps. It assumes that students learn best by reading excellent, whole-story examples of literature and by growing their skills through imitation. Each exercise is intended to impart a skill (or tool) that can be employed in all kinds of writing and speaking. The exercises are arranged from simple to more complex. What’s more, the exercises are cumulative, meaning that later exercises incorporate the skills acquired in preceding exercises. This series is a step-by-step apprenticeship in the art of writing and rhetoric.  The full series is 12 books that will train students over 6 years, starting in grades 3 or 4.

Book 1: Fable is a one-semester course for grades 3 or 4.  This book teaches students the practice of close reading and comprehension, summarizing a story aloud and in writing, and amplification of a story through description and dialogue. Students learn how to identify different kinds of stories; determine the beginning, middle, and end of stories; recognize point of view; and see analogous situations, among other essential tools.

The student edition is a consumable book.  Lessons include:

• Narration/telling it back (creating a natural sense of outline/sequence)
• Analogy—learning how this story is like/different from other stories
• Comprehension
• Sentence play/word play
• Rewriting (gaining a sense of internal structure of a piece of writing)
• Summary
• Amplification
• Rewriting given stories
• Speak It—experiencing the story from your own mouth (orally) with an audience for a different point of contact, often with some sort of change than the first time you heard it.

Answer key not included.

If you are not teaching multiple students, we suggest you purchase Book Set 1. It includes one student book along with the teacher’s edition (answer key, teacher notes, and explanations), and Mp3 audio files (to help engage their sense of hearing and listening).

Placement: In Writing & Rhetoric, placement is based on the student’s current experience in writing. The publisher first suggests looking through the table of contents included in each of the free Writing & Rhetoric samples (found on the individual product pages). Reviewing both the table of contents and the sample lessons will help you determine a good starting level for your student. They encourage parents to download and print the sample chapters of the textbooks (student book) to assist in determining placement. Other suggestions are:

• If you have a student in 4th–7th grade and are considering Writing & Rhetoric, the initial identifier of placement is to evaluate whether your student can acknowledge the 5 W’s (who, what, when, where, why) in an essay or is comfortable writing 6-paragraph essays. If not, we recommend looking at Book 3: Narrative II. Starting here will provide review from the first 2 books in the series, as well as more age-appropriate material with longer stories and more thoughtful questions in the lessons.
• If your student is confidently working through the 2 skills mentioned above, we would then suggest looking through Book 5: Refutation and Confirmation. In this book, students begin to support a cause or refute it. This is the beginning mark of persuasive writing (pre-thesis work) and helps them to begin research for an idea they will support in an essay.