Mommio: Poe Unit Study

While on our fabulous vacation in North Carolina I have had some down time to work on things related to homeschooling, primarily planning our next unit study that we will start mid-January on Edgar Allan Poe.  I decided that I will share my plans with the other toes by posting them on the blog, and it will help me with future planning to have it here too.  I have picked a Poe unit for several reasons.  First of all, our last two literature unit studies (Shakespeare and The Iliad/Odyssey) were such a huge success that I thought we should get back to another lit. based project. Secondly, the kids are all very involved in horror movies, books and games right now so I thought it would catch their interest.  And last of all, Poe was always one of my favorites to read and study and Connor has also developed quite an interest in his work...even reading it to us on car trips.  In preparation for this unit I read this book about Poe's life:

I also loaded up my kindle with this volume of Poe works, which I have glanced over a few times and intend to read some of the ones I am not familiar with later on:

I found this great study guide for middle school students to study Poe in the classroom and I am basing our unit on this study:

We will start off with a brief biography lesson on Poe for a few days using what I have read as well as this photo biography that I found:

After the introduction we will start reading various works by Poe.  The titles we will focus on for the unit are: The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, Ligeia, Hop-Frog, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Purloined Letter, The Raven, Eldorado, Annabel Lee and The Bells.  We might also read/listen to other works but those are the ones we will study in depth by using various activities that the kids will enjoy.  Some of them include making our own book of horror tales, making our own Poe anthology (like we did with The Iliad/Odyssey), doing some readers theater, etc.  I will read some of the works to the kids out of these two books I found that are done for children with some really cool illustrations:

We will also listen to some of the works on this audio collection:

And, as I always try to do, I got this graphic novel form of Poe's work for the kids to read themselves just for fun:

I think it will be another really great study that the kids will get very excited about and I can't wait to start!