Project 33: Ancient Greece

Solomon chose Ancient Greece as this week's project as he wanted to re-read The Wooden Horse and there hadn't been time when he had previously asked. Obviously there's a lot more to ancient Greece than that, and whereas with the Egyptian project you felt a week was enough, with the Greeks you were left feeling you'd barely scratched the surface. We were housebound (due to a case of the chicken pox), so we mostly focused on reading and watching videos.

We already had Usborne's Greek Myths collection, with versions of The Odyssey, Perseus and the Gorgon, Hercules the World’s Strongest Man, The Minotaur and The Wooden Horse, and these have always been loved by the children. There is, after all, a very good reason why these stories have lasted so many thousands of years, and Usborne is without doubt our favourite children's publisher. We supplemented this with some additional books from the library and also bought the Usborne's Ancient Greeks from their beginner series. The Usborne book was good because although it was simple, it allowed Solomon to get an overview of ancient Greek life in a single sitting.

Most of the videos we watched were from the TED-Ed channel, which had a wide range of videos on ancient Greek life (e.g., Athenian, Spartan), myths (e.g., Prometheus, Midas), and of course the Olympics. Solomon's favourite TED-Ed video of the week was one we watched in conjunction with reading Hercules and watching Jason and the Argonauts: What makes a hero?:

Solomon was also given a choice of watching either Jason and the Argonauts or Disney's Hercules this week, and whilst we expected him to pick Hercules, his interest was piqued by the skeleton battle in the trailer for Jason... This also turned out to be his favourite part of the film. Even in today's world steeped in computer graphics, the stop motion animation sequences hold their own.

We also got them to design their own Greek vases, and as Thursday was the local elections in the U.K. we compared ancient Greece's version of democracy with the one we have today.

Greek vases

Next week's project: Dictionaries