Weird and Wonderful Worlds

The Lost Tools of Writing is a curriculum designed to help students think rightly and write persuasively. Using the Canons of Rhetoric, students learn to read great literature classically, ask good questions about characters, and formulate clear, logical, persuasive writing.

Students will practice the writing from the conception of an idea to completion of the essay. Students will progress in their writing skills from creating a rudimentary essay through an advanced one.

Course Objectives

Students will:

1. Identify the three problems that every writer faces.
2. Use the tools, techniques, schemes, tropes that fix these problems.
3. Repeatedly practice writing the persuasive essay moving toward mastery.
4. Utilize the five topics of invention while thinking and writing about the books they are reading.
5. Read and engage with great literature by considering the actions of characters in the texts.

Texts

• The Lost Tools of Writing, Level One; 5th edition Student Workbook, CiRCE Institute

1st Semester Books

• Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
• A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle
• The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
• Over Sea, Under Stone, Book 1 of The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
• The Mysterious Benedict Society, Trenton Lee Stewart

2nd Semester Books

• Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, Robert C. O’Brien
• Out of the Silent Planet, C. S. Lewis
• The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
• The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien