Further up & Further In

by Diane Pendergraft

This rich study is based on C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia. It covers a wide range of subjects, including English and literature, history and social studies, geography, science, Bible and character building, cooking, and art. What Shakespearean play influenced The Voyage of the Dawn Treader? Where would you find minarets like those in The Horse and His Boy? What does Turkish Delight taste like? Step through the wardrobe with wardrobe with Further Up and Further In and find out! Like each of the Cadron Creek unit studies, Further Up and Further In is a highly self-contained curriculum. This full-year curriculum is an extensive study of The Chronicles of Narnia, which integrates a wide range of subject studies, including English literature, social studies, geography, Bible and character building, cooking, and art. It also supplements science and history. Each of the seven books in the Narnia series is studied in a separate four-week unit. The Appendix section comes complete with recipes, activity directions, recommended reading for background information, poems, a resource listing, and a list of subjects covered, organized under headings for quick reference. Adventurers who read at a fourth to eighth grade level will benefit the most from this study, but it may be easily adapted for anyone who is not too old to expand his or her horizons. The seven books in The Chronicles of Narnia will need to be purchased separately. (The 1995 printing of the Scholastic edition is referenced in this study.)

340 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are parent for homeschooled children in middle school or early high school, this is definitely a good book to check out.  While the author's fondness for lard and eels is not something I can endorse as someone who follows the biblical food laws, there is a great deal in this book that demonstrates a thoughtful use of C.S. Lewis' writing to provide not only a solid literature learning experience but also to connect Lewis' literature with other fields of study.  This particular textbook operates a lot differently from the ones I grew up with in English, but it looks like something that could be an effective unit for children, especially those who want to get the most out of learning based on Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia.  The book is well-organized and contains a lot of content, and gives plenty of resources for those who want to find the (sometimes out of print) works that are discussed herein, all of which makes this book the sort that would be appreciated by a parent who wanted to use Lewis' writings as part of an overall education effort that would probably count for a year's worth of credit or so in English.

If one includes the appendix material, there are more than 350 large pages to this unit study.  After an introduction the book is organized around the novels of the Chronicles of Narnia in the version of their chronology within the overall story, starting with the Magician's Nephew, then moving on to The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, then A Horse And His Boy, then Prince Caspian, then The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, then The Silver Chair, and finally The Last Battle.  Included in these units, which together take up more than 250 pages of material, there are fill-in-the blanks, crossword puzzles, rhetorical and cooking exercises, worksheets with animals found in the books, paragraph writing assignments and discussion materials, and Bible memory verses, among other assignments.  After this comes the appendices, which include the many subjects covered in this book, along with an activity appendix and a list of activities to do (including a list of recipes from the book), along with recommend readings, various other resources that can be used by the parent/teacher, answers to all of the questions found in the book, and an order form by the publisher.

Admittedly, I am reviewing this book at a bit of a disadvantage, not having been either a homeschooled student or a parent who homeschools children.  That said, this book was one that I enjoyed reading and could easily see the value of and I would think that this book would be greatly appreciated by a great many parents who would want to integrate Lewis' Christian fantasies into a course that combined literature with science, cooking, rhetoric, history, biblical studies, geography, arts, music, and other skills (including archery and horseback riding).  Even within literature this book does a good job at placing Lewis' writing in a framework that includes other poetry, some of Shakespeare's plays, and various mythic writing like Homer.   To be sure, this is not the only area of study that someone would want to have in a given year, but it certainly presents Lewis' writing and its connections with other areas of study that many young people will find of great interest and which may even include films like Shadowlands and the adaptations of three of the Narnia books.  All things considered, this book is one that a great many parents will appreciate as a learning resource for their older preteens or teenagers.

[Jo Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Am using this as a unit study guide to the chronicles of narnia