This Fall the youngest group of students took part in the school wide study of Ancient Greece. They focused on the daily life of children and compared their own schooling, clothing, homes, food, games and pots to those of Ancient Greece. Each student created a book documenting their comparisons of each topic.
They colored maps of Greece using a key to show the coast, mountains, Athens, Sparta, the Mediterranean Sea and the many Greek islands. They used visual thinking strategies to conclude that Ancient Greece had temples, stadiums for sports, mountains, Spartans, statues and vases. They also recognized that Ancient Greece was a sandy place, that Ancient Greeks wore “robes” and didn’t always wear shoes, they used clay to make pots, had “curved rectangles” (arches) in many of their buildings, did a lot of sports, and must have had a lot of stone to build with.
They used this background knowledge and new information we learned from reading books to add to their illustrations and written descriptions of each topic in their Ancient Greece books. They learned how to use an abacus, they drew a house plan of an Ancient Greek home, tried homemade hummus, ate olives and feta, decorated their own clay pot and watched an interactive video of the Ancient Greek Olympics.
