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ANCIENT GREECE UNIT STUDY
I don’t share every single unit study or art project or book we read in our homeschool, but sometimes there’s things that are just way too good not to share…our Ancient Greece unit study is one of those. We had so much fun learning about Ancient Greece and my kids worked so hard on projects and stretching their brains.
We use The Story of the World for history as our “spine.” We follow this book’s table of contents to keep us on track. I skip a lot of chapters in this book. Usually, I have a plan of big unit studies I want to do throughout the year and a lot of the chapters in Story of the World don’t fit with the study, so we skip those. We do listen to the CD with the lessons that go along with our units and use the map work and the coloring sheets and put all that, with other maps and worksheet type things we do, in a history binder. Each kid has their own.
We have already been through the ancients in our homeschool, so this is round two. Since Noah is a middle schooler and seeing this all for the second time, I try to make things a little more challenging for him. I gave him a packet called “Great Greeks” while I worked on some other books with the younger two. Noah had an assignment every day that he had to do. He worked independently and studied many of the “great Greeks” like Socrates and Archimedes. He read, wrote a short report, put together a display board showcasing three of his favorites, and he made a planetary model for the great Greek that discovered there was more than one planet.
Greek myths was another awesome part of our study. The kids loved reading Greek myths, especially Jack. He knows pretty much everything an 8-year-old could know about Greek mythology. He and Sophie made this family tree for the Greek god family.
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So much of what we say and do now is based on Greek mythology. We read countless stories about the gods. Some of our favorites were:
we also read
and
The Odyssey as part of this study too.
Next is Alexander the Great. We spent a good two weeks on Alexander the Great. We read John Gunther’s book Alexander the Great and it was a fabulous spine to our sub-study. After the first few chapters, I had the boys sketch out maps of what would be Alex’s territory and as we read, we followed his route on their maps with a tiny little black horse, Bucephalus, that we printed out and laminated.
Besides the maps, we made posters of the Gifts of Greece…their art, view on politics, music, and other amazing things that they have influenced in modern times. I also had the kids act out a skit, pretending to be Alexander, Queen Olympias, and King Phillip III. I thought my kids would hate this, but they did so well and it was so awesome to see them do this! The things they learned is definitely engrained after acting it out.
When we read The Iliad, they kids made a model of the Trojan Horse. Basically just a triangle of cardboard with popsicle sticks on top and then painted. The coolest though, is that there really is a secret compartment for the “Greeks” to hide. Its a really fun piece to have on our history shelf now.
Here’s a couple other books that we read a lot…
We had so much fun studying Greece. Now we’re on to Rome and the pressures on to make this unit really fun too. Not sure we can top it, but we’ll try our best. We are working on a Coliseum model right now. (Can you tell my favorite part of school is history?? :))
If you have any questions about unit studies, I would be happy to try and answer!
Happy learning, folks!
This is perfect. Thanks. I need to make a list of unit studies for the 2020-2021 school year. I am new to home schooling. This is my first formal year of doing so. Mainly this year so far we have been doing a lot of cooking, focusing on the basics like colour/shape/number/letter/word recognition, building confidence and working on social skills too. I am unsure what to teach the twins next year. What do you teach two three year old kids? Suggestions for history and geography particularly wanted.
I have been homeschool my boys for about 3 years now. I feel like we are classical with a charlotte mason twist, but I am discovering that my boys need more hands on and I'm more visual. So I'm on a quest to find what can make things a little more interesting and hands on fun. My biggest problem is time management and planning a unit study. Unfortunately, I don't think I learned anything in history when I was in school and pretty much hated it. After reading the well trained mind and other homeschool blogs I became so interested in history and the SOTW makes it so easy the understand. But as much as I try to plan it all out we either don't get the time to do the projects or I'm too lost to know where to start. Now my boys are very young, so I carry a lot of the work load and honestly have no idea how to simplify it or make them more interested. And SKIP a chapter how do you which one and how do you know how to break up a time period into unit study chunks. It all feel like Greek to me. I read all these how plan an unit study and all, but I just don't know how to make the plan a reality that doable for both me and my boys. Any advice is weclome! We are still trying to finish up SOTW 1 and I'm going to try my best to give ancient rome all I got! Dressing up, dinner, Roman soldiers armour. But I must admit I'm so worried it's going to blow up in my face! Thanks for sharing your ideas! And wish my luck! Ashley [email protected]
We are in Ancient Greece right now! I would love to know more about the "Great Greeks" packet for Noah. Is this somehing you made? Did you purchase it ready made? Your unit looks so fun! Thanks for sharing! xo