BELLA

Beyond English Language and Literary Arts

Ages 11-14     

 

Introduction

BELLA is an advanced course designed for students who are operating at a high level intellectually and whose English is effectively native for educational purposes.

‘Effectively native’ means that a student’s English does not usually interfere with their ability to reach their intellectual and creative potential when the language of instruction is English, in lessons as taught in native English-speaking countries.

In practice, this means three things: the ability to understand a teacher’s verbal explication without language supports; grade level reading level (native-English grade level) or higher; and the ability to express complex and creative ideas accurately, first time and most of the time, in speech and writing.

Once students reach that level, the BELLA program takes students beyond ordinary grade level knowledge through Studio’s trademark focus on deep cultural and historical immersion, broad skills development, and higher order thinking skills.

Students can expect to go deeper, into history and philosophy; broader, into the expressive skills of oral presenting and digital publishing; and higher, into the thinking skills of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, the building blocks necessary for cultivating creativity.

 

 

Semester One

 

Week 1

Introduction to Reading: Know the letters, sounds, words, sentence structures, paragraphing, and whole text conventions and terminology for the study of English Language and Literature

 

Week 2

476AD – 1066 and Beowulf:

  • Be able to read poetry (metre, rhyme, alliteration, figurative language)

 

Week 3

1066 – 1485 and Chaucer – The Canterbury Tales – The Nun’s Priest’s Tale:

  • Be able to analyse literature according to historical context

 

Week 4

Marlowe – Doctor Faustus:

  • Know the structure and conventions of a play
  • Understand the influence of antiquity on English Literature

 

Week 5

Shakespeare – Macbeth:

  • Know Shakespeare’s context, sources and influences

 

Week 6

Shakespeare – Romeo and Juliet – Blank Verse:

  • Analyse the relationship between verse and meaning

 

Week 7

Shakespeare – Sonnets – The Sonnet Form:

  • Analyse the relationship between a poem’s structure and its meaning

 

Week 8

Revolutions: Glorious, Industrial, American, French, and Romanticism – The Lyrical Ballads, Blake, Byron, Shelley, Keats:

  • Understand the relationship between historical change, intellectual change, and literary change

 

Week 9

Coleridge – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

  • Understand the Romantic poets’ ideas about nature – Part One

 

Week 10

Wordsworth – I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud:

  • Understand the Romantic poets’ ideas about nature – Part Two

 

Week 11

Coleridge – Kubla Khan:

  • Understand the Romantic poets’ ideas about creativity

 

Week 12

Mary Shelley – Frankenstein:

  • Understand the Romantic poets’ ideas about nature and science
  • Reading and writing gothic horror

 

Week 13

Robert Browning – My Last Duchess:

  • Understand dramatic monologues

 

Week 14

Presentation preparation:

  • Be able to present on an academic topic, live, in front of a group

 

Week 15

Presentations

 

Semester Two

 

Week 16

Dickens – Great Expectations：

  • Reading and writing a setting and character description
  • Reading and writing dialogue

 

Week 17

Dickens – Oliver Twist:

  • Reading and writing a setting and character description revisited

 

Week 18

Robert Louis Stevenson – Treasure Island:

  • Reading and writing adventure – setting antagonist, action scene

 

Week 19

  1. M. Barrie – Peter Pan:
  • Understand the differences between novels and plays
  • Writing dialogue – revisited

 

Week 20

The Russian Revolution and Arthur Ransome – Swallows and Amazons:

  • Understand biographical context
  • Writing adventure revisited – setting as integral to an action scene

 

Week 21

  1. S. Eliot – Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats & Macavity the Mystery Cat; Andrew Lloyd Webber – Cats:
  • Understand the influence of literature on popular culture

 

Week 22

The Interwar Period and Tolkien – The Hobbit:

  • Understand fantasy as contemporary history

 

Week 23

  1. S. Lewis – The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe:
  • Understand fantasy as allegory

 

Week 24

The Cold War, the Berlin Wall and John Le Carre – The Spy Who Came in from the Cold:

  • Be able to read for historical and biographical information, and reproduce for a specified audience

 

Week 25

Fleming – The Man with the Golden Gun:

  • Be able to write a dramatization of a novel in the form of a screenplay

 

Week 26

Horowitz – Skeleton Key and post-Cold War espionage fiction:

  • Be able to read and use semantic fields for creating atmosphere

 

Week 27

Student selections

 

Week 28

Presentation Preparation

 

Week 29

Presentation preparation:

  • Be able to present on an academic topic, live in front of a group

 

Week 30

Presentations