1. English Year 7 Half Term 1: The Odyssey (Writing Focus)
Story Features:
Style:
Grammar:
The Five Stage Plot Structure
Character – a person in a story.
Protagonist – the main character in a story.
Antagonist – the villain of a story.
Reflects culture's customs, values, and beliefs.
Reflection of human strengths, frailties, weaknesses, or imperfections.
Usually includes supernatural beings or events.
Believe main character can survive all obstacles to achieve goal.
Noun – naming word
Noun Phrase – a group of words that act like a noun
Personal Pronoun – a word that is used to replace a noun relation to a person or object
Determiner – words that introduce a noun and give some information about it but do not describe it
Verb – doing word
Prepositional Phrases - a group of words starting with a preposition and ending with a noun
Adverbs – describe a verb (how something is done).
Adjectives – describe a noun
Identifier – tells us who is speaking
Mood/
Atmosphere – the pervading tone of a place or situation e.g.
A haunting mood
A sympathetic mood
A vengeful mood
Setting/ scene – where the action takes place.
Exposition – start of the story introducing the characters and setting
Inciting Incident – something happens to start action
Rising Action – the situation gets worse
Climax – the most intense, exciting, or important point of the story.
Denouement – the ending/resolution.
Sentence Types/
Terminology:
Simple Sentence
Compound Sentence
Complex Sentence
Subordinate Clause
Main Clause
Coordinating conjunction
Subordinating conjunction

2. The Odyssey- Plot Summary
Olympus: Athena and Zeus discuss the fate of Odysseus, who, ten years after the fall of Troy, still not returned to his native Ithaca.
Ithaca: A band of rowdy suitors, believing Odysseus to be dead, has overrun his palace, courting his faithful - though weakening - wife, Penelope, and going through his stock of food.
The goddess Athena, Odysseus' greatest immortal ally, appears in disguise and urges Odysseus' son Telemachus to seek news of his father at Pylos and Sparta. However, the suitors, led by Antinous, plan to murder him upon his return.
Odysseus sets sail on a raft, but Poseidon, conjures up a storm. With Athena's help, Odysseus reaches the Phaeacians. Their princess, Nausicaa, opens the palace to the stranger. Odysseus withholds his identity for as long as he can until finally, at the Phaeacians' request, he tells the story of his adventures - The Lotus Eaters, and the Cyclops.
Next, the Cyclops Polyphemus devoured many of Odysseus' men before Odysseus allowed the rest to escape - but not before Odysseus revealed his name to Polyphemus and started his personal war with the sea god Poseidon.
The bag of wind - The wind god Ailos then provided Odysseus with a bag of winds to aid his return home, but the crew greedily opened the bag and sent the ship to the land of the giant, man-eating Laistrygonians, where they again barely escaped.
On their next stop, the goddess Circe tricked Odysseus' men and turned them into pigs. With the help of the god Hermes, Odysseus defied her spell and changed the pigs back into men. They stayed on her island for a year in the lap of luxury, with Odysseus as her lover.
When Odysseus finally leaves Circe, he next has to resist the temptations of the seductive and dangerous Sirens, navigating between the sea monster Scylla and the whirlpools of Charybdis, and plumbing the depths of Hades to receive a prophecy from the blind seer Tiresias.
Resting on the island of Helios, Odysseus' men disobeyed his orders not to touch the oxen. At sea, Zeus punished them and all but Odysseus died in a storm. It was then that Odysseus reached Calypso's island.
Odysseus finishes his story, and the Phaeacians hospitably give him gifts and ferry him home on a ship. Athena disguises Odysseus as a beggar and instructs him to seek out his old swineherd, Eumaeus; she will recall Telemachus from his own travels.
With Athena's help, Telemachus avoids the suitors' ambush and reunites with his father, who reveals his identity only to his son and swineherd. He devises a plan to overthrow the suitors with their help.
In disguise as a beggar, Odysseus investigates his palace. The suitors and a few of his old servants generally treat him rudely as Odysseus sizes up the loyalty of Penelope and his other servants. Penelope, who notes the resemblance between the beggar and her presumably dead husband, proposes a contest: she will, at last, marry the suitor who can string Odysseus' great bow and shoot an arrow through a dozen axe heads.
Only Odysseus can pull off the feat. Bow in hand, he shoots and kills the suitor Antinous and reveals his identity. With Telemachus, Eumaeus, and the invisible goddess Athena at his side, Odysseus leads the massacre of the suitors.
Odysseus reunites with Penelope, his knowledge of their bed that he built the proof that overcomes her concern that he is an impostor.

3. Key characters Key themes Historical context
Odysseus – King of Ithaca – famous for his cunning and resourcefulness
Telemachus – Odysseus’s son, on the verge of becoming a man
Penelope – Odysseus’s faithful wife
The gods - Zeus – King of the gods; Poseidon – King of Hades;
Athena – goddess of wisdom; Hermes – messenger of the gods.
The suitors –a group – men competing to marry Penelope and take Odysseus’s place
Autinous – their leader – antagonistic and offensive; Eurymachus – more reasonable and subtler; Amphinomus - the best & most honourable of the suitors
Circe – enchantress who falls in love with Odysseus
Cyclops – a one eyed monster and son of Poseidon
Justice, order & right conduct – Homer explores whether men should blame the gods for their misfortunes or accept responsibility for their actions; the behaviour of the suitors is seen as against the natural order.
Hospitality – good manners and the respect which should be given to guests, strangers and the less fortunate is very important to Homer. The suitors’ behaviour is contrasted with that of other characters.
Mortality – what it is to be human – comparisons with the divine
Ancient Greeks followed their own set of gods, Zeus being King of the gods.
Greece was referred to as the ‘birthplace for Western Civilisation’. The Ancient Greeks tried out democracy, started the Olympic Games and left new ideas in science, art and philosophy (thinking about life).
Most Greeks lived in villages or in small cities with beautiful temples with stone columns and statues, and open-air theatres where people sat to watch plays.
The Trojans lived in the city of Troy, in what is now Turkey. The story of their war with the Greeks is told in the Iliad, a long poem dating from the 700s BC, and said to be by a storyteller named Homer. The Odyssey, also by Homer, is the tale of the adventures of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, on his way home after the war.
The Trojan War began when Paris, Prince of Troy, ran away with Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. The Greeks sent a fleet of ships to get her back. The war lasted for 10 years. In single combat, the greatest Greek warrior, Achilles, killed the Trojan leader Hector. In the end the Greeks won, by using Odysseus’ clever trick using a wooden horse to enter the city.
The Odyssey is set 19 years after Odysseus set sail for Troy and 10 years after the siege ended and the Greeks won the war. Odysseus has ben held captive by the nymph Calypso who had fallen in love with him and held him hostage.