ReadHarry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling. You'll have to buy or borrow this one, but it's widely available and has been on best seller lists for years now. It experiences a resurgence in interest with every new Harry Potter movie and book.Audio available from audio.com and other sources--check your local library! Questions for the Discussion BoardHere are the standards for the U.S. Newbery award. Based on these criteria, explain how well the book meets these standards of excellence, using specifics examples from the book. Give the book an overall score, 1-10 high for overall achievement.The criteria for excellence:Interpretation of the theme or conceptPresentation of information including accuracy, clarity, and organizationDevelopment of a plotDelineation of charactersDelineation of a settingAppropriateness of style.How well did the novel meet these standards for excellence, and what examples do you give for each of these criterion?Your score:Where might you recommend that an illustrator add an illustration? Who might you recommend for the job of illustrating Harry and his adventures? Why? Please note: your answer needs to recommend someone other than the cover illustrator.This book is wildly popular at the turn of the millennium. Should we include it in the textbook, given that its longevity is unknown? At what point can we say this book is a 'keeper' and no longer just a popular fad? (An aside: I began teaching this course and book when the book was new-it's not so new anymore, so we have some vantage point of history to guide us.)What items/characters/events in the book remind you of others in other literature? For example, hypogriffs are from Greek mythology, and the chess game comes from Alice through the Looking Glass. Please be as exhaustive as you can.Is this book English enough to represent English literature for children? Why or why not?ResponsePlease respond to at least one colleague in the class with a substantial response that shows your agreement/disagreement/questions about their answers to the questions for the lesson.ResearchPlease evaluate these websites for inclusion in our textbook:J.K. Rowling http://www.jkrowling.com/Harry Potter Scholastic http://harrypotter.scholastic.com/Differences between British and US versions of PS: https://www.hp-lexicon.org/2001/08/25/differences-... Try this game and see which house in Hogwarts you’d be assigned to:Harry Potter Sorting Hat Quiz http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Reviews/HarryPotter...Extra for ExpertsA current movie that’s both like Harry Potter and quite different. Please view and review for the class:Fantastical Beasts and Where to Find ThemLesson 13 Lecture Hogwarts StudioReview Fairy tales and folk tales are alive and well in the United States, brought to us by immigrant cultures. The problem of objectivity in collecting stories, first raised by the Grimms, is alive and well as well, as is the problem of authenticity when collection and transmission happens through a non-native. Fairy tale material lends itself to many fictional uses and still has a large following, as we'll see in this learning unit.Lecture Harry Potter is a wildly successful series that is very popular with elementary teachers and students alike. It's clearly a "real" book with hard cover, good quality paper and elegant lay-out of the page. For many younger readers, it’s the first book-length work they’ve ever read.This book is a reading phenomenon because it is fantasy and has caught the attention of boys, especially boys who do not like to read. It's an easy read, in that its language may occasionally be strange, but it's not dense, like poetry. There's enough easily read language that anything extraordinary can be understood by the context. Authors like Alison Lester have shown authors like J.K. Rowling how to design chapters, titles, and intertwined plots to capture the interest of reluctant readers.Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is also a book with lots of commentary in the popular press and on the net. There have been times that an extremely popular book has automatically been judged as inferior, as if there must necessarily be something wrong or mediocre about it. So far, there has been very little criticism of Harry Potter, except by those who judge anything about witchcraft and wizardry to be automatically unacceptable. If you are going to be teaching literature in the public schools, you will want to be aware of the readers who judge the book without reading it and be prepared to deal with those readers.By now, Harry Potter has become a real academic--in other colleges, it's possible to take an entire course just on Harry Potter books. So in some ways, Harry has become 'institutionalized' by his inclusion in higher education. His 'fad' status is in some doubt, though he's no Shakespeare yet.Harry Potter is a book about outsiders, about being different but special. Remember a time when you felt like the "ugly duckling" and how you knew you weren't doomed, but were singled out for something special. The book comes out of a tradition of excellent British high fantasy for children, exemplified by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Dealing with world-threatening issues of good and evil is almost expected. There is nothing particularly Scottish or English about the fantasy. In some ways, this is a global novel that appeals widely across the world, a phenomenon of sorts.J.K. Rowling is a Scottish woman who uses her initials so as not to alienate young male readers. This is her first novel, in a series of seven, each one dealing with a successive year in Harry Potter’s middle school and high school experience. It’s been part of this course since the series started and the course started, so long that younger classmates don’t remember a time without Harry Potter.This book accomplishes what all the fairy tales we read could not do--it has attracted a male and a female audience, and the presence of Hermione and Professor McGonnigle has delighted the hearts of many a feminist. For a school story, it's remarkably co-ed and even-handed in its treatment of both sexes. The English school story has a long history, unmatched by similar stories in other parts of the world. It’s the school setting that makes this story particularly British.Before you readThere will be lots of similarities to the folk and fairy tales we have read in the earlier learning units. Keep an eye out for those similarities because you’ll be asked about them in the discussion questions.Anecdotes I think that I would like to play Minerva McGonnigle--or maybe I just wish that I were Maggie Smith. My oldest son is only five weeks younger than Harry Potter (at least, if you go by the original publication date being Harry's 11th birthday). He has had a bedroom under the stairs (it's not a closet, and it has no lock on the door) and a scar between his eyebrows from a childhood fall. He even wore glasses before he got contacts. And there is this Asian young woman. . . with nothing really going on.Hedwig?