A Christmas Carol

The Telemachos Guided Reading Editions of classic novels are designed to encourage educators to teach once again from the unabridged literary treasury of Western Civilization. Each edition provides students-unaccustomed to the sentence structure and vocabulary of novels written over a century ago-a path, alongside the story itself, of directed questions, which light their way toward understanding the novel's concrete details of plot, character, conflict, and imagery, details essential for all young readers to grasp when they enter, for the first time, into the world created by Charles Dickens.

Each classic in our series

• outlines an interpretive method to improve close reading, a process that shows students how to develop commentary beyond the plot, strategies used by top performing students on national exams.
• guides the students to examine key details as they read each page of the text-questions regarding key literary elements- setting, character, tone, atmosphere, point of view, plot, and dialogue.
• identifies significant passages throughout the text that develop key thematic patterns-providing sample prompts that appear on standardized exams.
• provides annotations for historical and literary context.
• provides samples of annotated pages, for plot and for theme.
• includes a glossary of challenging vocabulary.

About the Editor

Editor / Ian Berry, MA has been teaching English for the past decade at Jesuit College Preparatory School. His first book co-authored with his former teacher and colleague Michael Degen (The English Coach's Instructional Playbook: Teaching Strategies Informed by Neuroscience, Athletics, and Psychology, 2024), draws upon brain research to guide young readers to access their potential as readers and writers-a desire at the heart of our Guided Reading series.