Arion — Musician and Poet for Middle & High School Mythology Series ELA

Why does a dolphin save a boy from Corinth? Arion was a court musician robbed and thrown into the sea by greedy sailors. Learn how a dolphin saves the day — plus many text-to-text connections to Greco-Roman mythology. This lesson includes a 2-day lesson plan, including art and literature connections, a question bank, discussions, informational text, reading cards, and more.

2-Day Lesson Educational Resource Includes:

• 1 Teacher Two-day Lesson Calendar (with Teacher’s Notes)
• 1 Key Characters and Places Worksheet
  • Orient your learners by identifying the key characters and the geographical location associated with Periander’s Corinth and Arion’s visit to Sicily. Includes map activity.
• Reading Cards:
  • Arion, Musician, and Poet (with illustrations)
  • Quote Card: From ‘On the Fortune of the Athenians,’ by Plutarch in Moralia, Volume IV (circa. 120 C.E.)
• 18-Count Question Bank
  • Have students read myths and stories about Athena, Apollo, and Marsyas. Assess them with questions!
• Frayer Model Vocabulary Card Set (with student sample)
  • Frayer models are a way to get kids to think about vocabulary visually in a four-section square — A square for meaning, one for examples, another for non-examples, and a sketch. It is amazing to see the work they produce.
• 3-2-1 Exit Ticket
  • Exit tickets are a way to get data about your students’ understanding of the lesson right before the class is finished. Collect these exit tickets and quickly see what your students have learned.
• 1 Further Reading List
  • Don’t disregard this further reading list if you think it is merely a bibliography. Share the list with your students or have them do projects based on the available research. Assign different sources to students and organize presentations where learning can go deeper into the myth.
• Answer Keys for all student-facing documents
  • Teachers always ask for answer keys for my products, so I gave you plenty of guidance on what to expect from students in their written and oral responses.
• Standards Alignment Chart (Common Core, TEKS. VA SOL)

I created this resource with middle and high students in mind. It is designed for an English Language Arts Mythology unit —

• For any myth-related unit!
• On Musician, Lyre playing in Ancient Greece, Musical Contests, Dolphins in Literature, The Court of Periander, the Cult of Arion
• Use this resource as a stand-alone lesson or pair it with a larger unit on Myth, Herodotus’s Histories, Plutarch’s works, Robert Graves’s Greek Myths, or Bernard Evslin’s Heroes, Gods, and Monsters (1966).

For resources similar to this one, see my:

• Our popular Plato’s Cave lesson!

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