The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“Chronicle a Quest”

Using the original text for inspiration, students will create a new quest involving one or more characters from the book for presentation through a skit or expressive oral storytelling.

In a group of 3-5 students, use a traditional hero’s journey plotline to create a new quest for a character in Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights.

• Brainstorm the tasks involved in a quest and the lessons learned.
• Decide on the subject of the quest and the central conflict that your hero will confront.
• Select your cast of characters. Choose a character from the text to serve as the hero figure on the quest. This character can be a main figure or an incidental character whom you promote to a protagonist position.
• Select secondary characters from the legends for your tale or create newly imagined ones. What archetypal character roles will be needed for your hero’s quest? Populate your story with characters to fill the needed roles.
• Confer with your group on the plot points of the hero’s quest. Write these as bulleted points or in a brief summary.
• Prepare to present your quest to the class as a short skit in which group members play character roles, or in an expressive story told aloud in which group members take turns revealing the plot points of the quest.

As the quests are told to the class, find points of commonality in the various heroes’ journeys and archetypal roles.

Teaching Suggestion: It might be helpful to take one of the quests from the text and ask students to analyze its events and characters. These might then be mapped to the quest the group is trying to create. Some attention might also be given to the narrative style of a chronicle as opposed to the point of view in a novel.

• This discussion and 3-minute video on the archetypal roles in the hero’s journey may help students to grasp the archetypes quickly for the purpose of completing this activity.
• For more information and examples of how Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey monomyth and the accompanying character archetypes apply to modern storytelling, refer to Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters.

Differentiation Suggestion: Visual learners might sketch a map of the route that the protagonist will follow to complete the quest, illustrating pitfalls along the way. Auditory learners might compose a song describing the quest and celebrating the exploits of its participants.