Percy Jackson & The Olympians

Percy Jackson & The Olympians,

by Rick Riordan

Who is Rick Riordan?

Rick Riordan was an English teacher for 15 years who wrote part time. He had success with his adult mystery series featuring a detective named Tres Navarre. Recently, Rick has made the decision to leave the field of teaching so that he can write on a full time basis. “I love teaching,” says Riordan. “I love working with kids . . . maybe someday I’ll go back to the classroom. I’m not ready to say it’ll never happen. But for now, the books are keeping me very busy.”

According to a handout from Hyperion Books, a bedtime story shared with his oldest son was the beginning of Rick’s journey into the world of children’s books. Riordan was asked by his son Haley to tell him some bedtime stories about the gods and heroes in Greek mythology. “When I ran out of myths, (Haley) was disappointed and asked me if I could make up something new with the same characters.” At the time, Haley had just been diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. Greek mythology was one of the only subjects that interested the then second-grader in school. Motivated by Haley’s request, Riordan quickly came up with the character of Percy Jackson and told Haley all about the quest to recover Zeus’s lightning bolt in modern-day America. “Making Percy ADHD and dyslexic was my way of honoring the potential of all the kids I’ve known who have those conditions,” says Riordan. “It’s not a bad thing to be different. Sometimes, it’s the mark of being very, very talented. That’s what Percy discovers about himself in The Lightning Thief.”

Online Reviews

Rick’s website - this has a lot of information linked through it. You can browse through his site, the site about his adult novels, or the site with the Percy series. There is a book list of Rick's suggestions for kids, and even some ideas on how to incorporate Percy into the classroom.

Biographical information

AdLit.org's interview with Rick

Rick's blog

Wondering how to effectively teach these texts?

Depending on the grade level, a brush up of Greek Mythology will more than likely be needed. Riordan does a nice job of reviewing who has done what, but if you wanted to build a deeper level of engagement with the students, knowing the history of the Titans vs. Gods/etc would allow the student more time to focus on what is going on in the novel, and less time focused on WHY it is all such a big deal. You could have a jigsaw activity, where students are broken into groups and each group is responsible for teaching their assigned god to the other groups, or even just have a character sheet that gets filled out each time someone new is introduced.

I believe that the Percy books could be done mutually with a Social Studies teacher. In addition to the mythology, there is a lot of geography/traveling going on in each of the books. Student's could go more into detail of where their demigod lives and what about the area is beneficial or harmful to them.

In addition to using the ideas provided on Riordan's site, it would also be possible to have a writing and research unit where students were responsible for writing a "new" demigod into existance and doing research on the parent that the child would be inheriting their ability from. Some example ideas to model with could be taken from this fanfiction site, where there are tons of stories written (some more detailed than others).

Something that a student will NOT be able to do is see the movie instead of watching the book - there are just too many differences between the 2. I do recognize that visual learners might need the added support of some movie clips, it shouldn't replace the book.

Essential Questions:

1-Percy has ADHD and Dyslexia, and yet what this means in the book is just that his brain is "hardwired" for ancient Greek and the modern alphabet is difficult for him. In my own reading, I thought that similar to Sherman Alexie's novel, Percy's reading difficulties were not the focus of the book, just something mentioned and accepted. How is this a good thing for classes with students who have disabiliteis? What could be a negative outcome of this treatment of ADHD/dyslexia?

2-If you could be a demigod, who would you be? Why? (Come on, we have to have some fun questions in here, too!! And how else will we do the lesson with our students if we don't have an example to use?!)

3-Using the unique "family" situation that Percy has, how does this support help him through his quests? What other supports in addition to his mother does Percy have? How could these supports be used to illuminate supports for students in the classroom?

EXTRAS!

Movie site

Clash of the Titans movie preview - another Percy on a quest, could be used to show that Greek mythology still has appeal today (although i still love the original in all of it's claymation glory!)

Percy in Graphic Novel form!

New series incorporating Egyptian Mythology, The Kane Chronicles, is due out in May!