Reddit mentions of Jim Henson's The Storyteller: Greek Myths

I wrote an answer on mobile, it got deleted, so I'm back on desktop for another try.

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First, what's the objective? I'll assume you're CCSS or CCSS-adjacent. For 7th grade, this is the strand on character:

Analyze how an author develops and contrasts the points of view of different characters or narrators in a text.

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When I teach that standard, I use something like this:

Character Analysis on Theseus (Jim Henson's Storyteller Greek Myths)

or this:

Character Analysis on Chidi (from The Good Place) contrasted with Character Analysis on Eleanor (also from The Good Place)

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The idea is to break down the character into parts - what they say about themselves, what others (or the narrator) says about them, what they want, how they treat others, etc. - and find evidence for those parts. In both of those examples, we write down the actual words from the text. You'll see it's basically the same Google Draw document in both, but I vary the text in the instructions to best fit the character we're studying. I literally have a copy of that for every major character in every major text we study.

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Then you can dig into how to explain those observations using inferences. I don't want to accidentally spoil The Good Place for anyone, so I'll use Theseus & the Minotaur. In Theseus, the narrator says that Theseus promises Ariadne everything, just as his father once promised his mother everything.

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So what is the narrator asking us to infer about Theseus there? Not just that he doesn't keep his promises. It's also that he is just like his father, and his end will be as tragic as his father's end. That he breaks promises to every important person in his life.

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That discussion leads into the central question of the text: is he a hero? And what defines a hero? That's the question I ask them to answer with evidence from the text.

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To push them even farther, it's really about framing. If you find a traditional version of the Theseus story, Theseus is painted as a hero; in The Storyteller, the narrator is the one pushing you to the conclusion that Theseus isn't a hero. So you can compare the view of Theseus by the narrator and how it shapes our view of him. They can answer that question using evidence from both texts. How do the details given about Theseus lead you to draw conclusions about his heroism?

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Another way to go is straight text analysis. This is a passage I use from The Waves, by Virginia Woolf. I've taught this to 6th graders, both using computers and printed out and using different colours of highlighter.

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The idea is to find connections, like animals, colour words, round things, nature words, etc. and highlight the pattern in a particular colour. Then isolate the lines from each character and see what you notice about them from what they say. Look at who speaks first, and who speaks last. Look at who seems to say random, unconnected things. Look at who is a leader and who is a follower. Look at who connects what one character says to something another character says.

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You need no background knowledge on the text to draw really rich character portraits of all the children. Plus, you get to say you taught Woolf to middle schoolers, which is not an experience most people get to have.

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Let me know if there's anything that I need to explain more - this is just a quick overview of some of the stuff I use to help kids get deep into character analysis.