Ancient Greece
By : admin

“Quality is not an act, it is a habit.”

-Aristotle

Welcome to our Ancient Greece homeschool unit! This unit is designed for kids from K to 6th grade, and it includes projects, art, and experiments involving Ancient Greece. Along with our Greece unit, we started our rocks and minerals unit (post coming soon). The rocks and minerals went along with both ancient Greece and our next unit ancient Rome. At the end of this post, you can find a suggested schedule and supplies for studying Greece!

Books about Ancient Greece

First up in our ancient Greece homeschool unit is to check out books from the library! These are the ones that I recommend for your K-6 kids. Click the title for a link to a YouTube video if the book has one available. I recommend doing either the Pompeii buried alive or the Magic Tree house (or both) as an independent read for younger elementary. For a family read aloud, we enjoyed reading Aesop’s Fables together. For older children, we like “The Children’s Homer” or “Archimedes and the Door of Science”. I would recommend these for upper elementary.

  • “Magic Tree House Hour at the Olympics” – Mary Pope Osborne
  • “Magic Tree House Fact Tracker: Ancient Greece” – Mary Pope Osborne and Natalie Pope Boyce
  • “Stallion by Starlight” – Mary Pope Osborne. Fictional Merlin Mission about Alexander the Great. Great for a 3rd-5th grader to read alone.
  • “Archimedes and the Door of Science” – by Jeanne Bendick
  • “The Children’s Homer”- by Padriac Colum
  • “Projects about Ancient Greece” – Marion Broida – this is one of a series of projects books, they tell a story about ancient culture, while also presenting short projects to do along with the book if you like – our knuckle bones project came from this book
  • “Craft like the Ancient Greeks” – by Craft Box. This is another great series with art projects about different cultures.
  • “Passport to Ancient Greece” by Richard Tames
  • “Art and Civilization: Ancient Greece” – Matilde Bardi
  • “Step into Reading: The Trojan Horse” – We have fallen in love with non-fiction step into reading books for my third grader. Most are a little below her reading level, but she has a chance to read all about history or science in a short 15 minute book, and on her own!
  • “The Fables of Aesop” – Frances Barnes Murphy – This is a collection of all the fables of Aesop. I don’t have a YouTube link for this one, however, my kids really enjoy the many cartoon Aesop fables on there, like this one about the Fox and the Stork.

Videos

If you prefer to video learn, we enjoyed these:

Geography

Most of our history units start with geography. I like to give my kids an idea about where world cultures are located. For geography this week, we made an aged map. We discussed that the map might have been made of papyrus. To make the ancient map, we found a free printout of the Roman Empire.

Then, we dipped the paper in into warm water with a couple of tea bags on a small tray. After about an hour, the tea gets soaked into the paper. Then you can take it out and let it dry before labeling it, or just using it as a demonstration. We used our aged map for both this unit and for our next unit on Rome. (It was also worth mentioning to the kids that eventually Rome took over ancient Greece, which is why the map is labeled the Roman Empire!)

Ancient Greek Architecture

Greek culture was so much fun to learn about. We started with architecture. I showed the girls a picture of the Parthenon, and then asked them what they thought that it looked like in modern times. They thought it looked like a library or the White House! We discussed how the Greeks built some of the first columns in history, and that these designs are still used today.

Next, the girls built our own Parthenon out of marshmallows, graham crackers, and frosting. We had some friends over to build as well. The picture to the left is one of the best ones from the group.(We repeated this project the following year, and our results were much more successful – see picture at the top of the page).

Greek Culture & Food

Next we moved into Greek cooking. There are so many excellent Greek recipes out there! When we go to the Greek festival in our area, my kids love the fried doughnuts that they make, loukoumades. I’m not sure that they actually made these in Ancient Greece — and ours didn’t quite turn out as great as at the festival — but it was fun to make them anyway! Check out the recipe here. We also created our own version of Gyro’s – with pita bread, shredded chicken, lettuce, and store bought tzatziki sauce.

For art, the kids chose a project to make from one of the books – Craft like the Ancient Greeks. They decided to make a pan pipe, a type of Ancient Greek instrument. This activity is fairly simple, all you need is double sided tape, gold paint, popsicle sticks, twine, and straws (preferably jumbo straws, but we couldn’t locate any.)

If you don’t have access to the book, this is how to make the pan pipe. First, lay two popsicle sticks down and put double sided tape on each of them. Then lay your straws (8 that are all cut to slightly different sizes) along one of the popsicle sticks. Press the second stick on top. Paint the whole thing in gold paint. Finally, once it’s dried, you can tie twine to it to wear it like a necklace (not pictured).

Last up, we tried to re-create an ancient Greek game called knuckle-bones. This activity is in the “Projects about Ancient Greece” book. In ancient Greece, they used real bones to play this game. We weren’t about to play with animal bones, so we used clay! The girls formed 5 tiny round pieces that would be the “bones”. After your clay has dried, you place all the “bones” in one hand. You gently throw up the pieces, flip your hand so the palm is facing down, and try to catch them on the back of your hand! Much more challenging than it sounds.

More Greek History

One of the topics I wanted my kids to remember most in our Ancient Greece homeschool unit, is that the Greeks created the first Olympics! We read about the Olympics in both the Magic Tree House book and in the fact tracker. We also watched the video on YouTube. The best part though, was making up a mock Olympic games with our friends! We had a running race, discus (plastic plate throwing), Javelin (plastic straw throwing), and long jump. My children also wrote an assignment about the Olympics as well – this can be found in my tpt reading comprehension and writing packet on the Greek Olympics.

Greek Gods were another favorite topic among my two children. I had purchased a game — pictured on the left — to practice math skills, called Zues on the Loose. It has the names of all the gods with descriptions on the cards. Plus, it is a fun game as well! We bought it for $10 from amazon here. It’s a fast paced card game to practice adding within 100. Perfect for my 1st grader. Note: you are supposed to play multiple rounds of this game according to the directions, but we often just play one round.

Want to learn more about Greek Gods in a fun way? Pick up one of my daughter’s favorite books – Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief series! She also helped create a Greek God’s and Goddesses matching activity. Click the image to the right to purchase.

Music & Literature

While I would have loved spend more time studying the ancient Greek philosophers (maybe next year), we were only able to get to talking about Aesop during our Ancient Greek homeschool unit. We read one of his famous fables “The Tortoise and the Hare”, and we able to incorporate this fable into several different activities. I found a free Tortoise and the Hare unit from Maestro classics. Maestro classics is a music curriculum company. They have many free curriculum guides on their website. Although I skipped the science and history portions of this free unit, I did use the literature and the music sections. We listened to the different orchestra instruments through their videos links – which my children enjoyed learning about. Bonus, they also created out own version of an Aesop fable!

Wrap up

That’s a wrap for our unit! It was a busy week, I’m not sure how we fit in all in. Hope you are able to enjoy some of our activities at home with your kids. Please see below my suggested schedule and supplies. If you missed our unit on Ancient Egypt, you can find it here! Stay tuned for Ancient Rome next!

Suggested Ancient Greece Homeschool Unit Schedule:

  • Monday: Read Magic Tree House Chapter Book
  • Tues: Geography: Greece, Greek Olympics Packet & Mock Olympics
  • Wed: Knuckle bones games. Make an edible Parthenon, Make a pan Pipe
  • Thurs: Tortoise and Hare Unit: Write a Fable & Make a recipe. Timeline
  • Fri: Watch Disney+ series on Greece, Zeus on the Loose game

Supplies:

  • plastic or paper plates
  • plastic or stainless steel straws
  • marshmallows
  • graham crackers
  • frosting
  • air dry or oven bake clay
  • black tea bags
  • popsicle sticks
  • jumbo straws
  • double sided tape
  • twine
  • gold paint
  • For Gyros- pita, chicken, Tzatziki sauce, lettuce

For the loukoumades

  • 1 cup of lukewarm water (240g /8.5 oz.)
  • 1 cup of lukewarm milk (240g/ 8.5 oz.)
  • 15 g active dry yeast (0.5 oz.)
  • 3 and 1/4 of a cup flour (450g /16 oz.)
  • 2 tbsps sugar
  • 1 flat tsp salt
  • 4 tbsps olive oil
  • oil for frying

To garnish

  • 3/4 cup honey (350g/ 13 oz.)
  • cinnamon powder
  • chopped walnuts

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