Teacher Guide for the Journey of Truth and Justice

PURPOSE OF THIS TEACHER’S GUIDE: This is a reference book, so you can decide what would be most useful for your young reader. You know them best. It all depends on their academic level and where you want to guide them. Informal logical fallacies are at the core of this series, so much of the guide is about them. However, there are opportunities to assign other academic work based on hooks or triggers I have placed in the stories. I will point those out and make specific suggestions. The first section is a book-by-book, chapter-by-chapter series of questions to provoke thought and trigger additional assignments. The second section is reference materials. The third section is suggested lesson plans.OUR VISION: We hope to see our grandchildren, most of whom are grown, using these stories to teach their children, our great-grandchildren, critical thinking skills. This is all written for and to them. We hope others find them useful and enlightening, but understand that when you read this, you are listening to an old man telling stories to his great-grandchildren and trying to help his grandchildren use the stories to teach important life lessons.WORLDVIEW: This teacher’s guide was written from a Christian point of view. You can still use it if you have a different view, but many of the assignments and ideas will not work for you as is. You will have to adapt them to your views. The stories are not specifically Christian. They uphold clear thinking, courage, honesty, courtesy, and fair play, but Christianity does not have a monopoly on those virtues. So even if you are not a Christian, you can use these stories to help your young reader develop better critical thinking skills.INTENDED AUDIENCE: As written, I believe children will enjoy and benefit from all these stories. They stand on their own, without this teacher’s guide, as a way for the children to grow their analytical skills. The target audience is school children in grades 4 to 8, but if you read them aloud to younger children or read with them, I’m sure they will learn to analyze better as well. If your reader is older, but they still like fantasy, as I did and do, the stories might work for them as well. Another idea is to have your high school children use this guide to teach your younger children. That way, the whole family learns together.