Black Beauty Interactive
Learn about horses, life in Victorian England, the author Anna Sewell, and her Christian beliefs in this interactive course on the best-selling book, Black Beauty.
For each chapter of the book, the course provides a video pairing the text with an audio version of the chapter (read in a nice British accent). Students may "read" the book this way or may use any unabridged copy of Black Beauty. In addition, there are commentary videos for each chapter as well as self-correcting online and print quizzes.
Complete Course Outline, Registration, and Login
Course Price
$29
- 49 Chapters, each with the audio text
- 49+ Commentary videos (some chapters have more than one commentary video)
- Suggested Approach and Course Checklist (PDF)
- 23 Self-correcting online quizzes (one every 2 or 3 chapters)
- 23 Downloadable print versions of those quizzes
- PDF containing 70 questions that may be used for discussion or writing
- Brief biography of Anna Sewell (PDF)
- Various notes and charts on the book
Course Details
For each chapter of the book, I'll provide comments and explanations for anything that may be unclear to modern readers, especially expanding on the horse information and practices of Sewell's time, as well as Scriptural principles and applications.
Ages: Although considered a children's book today, Black Beauty was not written to children. Anna Sewell wrote the book for those who worked with and used horses, in order to promote the kind treatment and responsible care of the animals.
There's absolutely nothing immoral in the book, but it does include the abuse of horses and the death of 2 men and a few horses (Black Beauty has a happy ending). I'd guess an age of about 11 or 12 and up would generally be suitable based on individual sensitivity to those things. Sewell addresses the problem of alcohol abuse and drunkenness as well.
If you don't have a print copy of Black Beauty, this edition illustrated by Christian Birmingham is the most beautiful one I've seen.
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Introduction to the Course
Overview of what the course includes.
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Black Beauty Chapter 1 Text and Audio
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Chapter 1 Commentary pt. 1
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Chapter 1 Commentary pt. 2
Test your knowledge of Black Beauty by taking this first quiz, consisting of 15 questions. This covers the first two chapters of the book.
Preview chapter 2 videos here.
I'm excited about being able to offer the quizzing aspect of this course. This is the first of my courses to offer this. There are a variety of question types: multiple choice, true/false, fill in the blank, drag and drop, hotspot, and a few more. The quiz questions cover aspects of the novel as well as the additional horse information provided in the course.
- For quizzes that have more than fifteen questions, fifteen will be randomly selected from the question pool, so a slightly different quiz will be given each time.
- You can print out a page showing the score and results at the end of the quiz if you'd like that for record-keeping.
- Students in the course will have access to a downloadable PDF for each quiz. This will contain all the possible questions for that quiz as well as an answer key on the final page.