Celebrating Ancient Greece

 It has been a while since I've written, but I wanted to share with you the amazing experience I was able to make for my students, with the help of my students' parents and colleagues. 

We have been reading Story of the World Volume 1: Ancient Times. My third graders starting reading Volume 1 last year and got about half way through it. We started learning about Ancient Greece at the beginning of the year and have been taking our time learning everything we can!

I work in a Classical Christian school, so much of what we are learning is shown through narrations. Sometimes these are verbal narrations, picture narrations, or written narrations. I encourage you if you don't know about narrating, it is a wonderful practice to use the gift children have been given, mimicking and retelling. You can read more about Know and Tell: The Art of Narration.

We started our week learning about specific games the ancient greeks would participate in. I created this Ancient Olympics pamphlet (as I'm having them make their own pamphlets in the coming week) as an informational text for them to read as their morning work. 

Also in Literature, from the beginning of the year, we have been reading Greek Myths. There are many great books out there, but my class has really liked D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths. At the end of every day, we end the day reading one of the short tales, and then the students will narrate with a partner. I will then choose 1 student to narrate for everyone, we close our day with any additions or corrections to the original narration. As our trimester ends next week, I will have the students decide on one of the Greek gods to illustrate in a pamphlet. 

But back to the Greek Day last week. For the past few weeks I have had the students familiarizing themselves with the Greek alphabet. We learned a song to help us remember the Greek Alphabet. My students sing it now during transitions, when we are walking to garden class, or in the morning as we get ready. 

The day before Greek Day, I broke up my students into teams for the Olympics. Each team had a greek letter name, such as Alpha, Omega, Lambda, Sigma, Kappa, and Delta. They made team flags on a piece of chart paper. 

Greek Day we started our day with created the head ware. I had pre-cut green construction paper leaves, as well as the green strips taped together. The students were identified by their Olympic team by the different color ribbons that I had hot-glued on their green strips. The students then glued the leaves to their head ware and then we taped it when they were complete and they put them on their heads! 

Afterward, it was time to get our chitons on! Our chitons were simple, king size large pillowcases. I had some wonderful ladies at our school that volunteer their time weekly cut out holes for the heads, and then just slice the arm holes down the sides. We also jazzed it up by some gold rope tied around their waist. Make sure you order enough! Each child needed about 32 inches to leave a little extra room after the rope was tied around their waist for a bit of it to hang down. We didn't have enough, so I had to have a co-worker run to Hobby Lobby to pick up some more, and it wasn't exactly the same color, and the kids noticed! 

We then headed outside for the Olympic Games. The students carried their team flags, and then we played the National Anthem and some Olympic Music I found on YouTube. We hung their flags on the fence and their teams were announced.

The Gymnastics (GE) teacher and I had events planned, so she had the field all ready for us when we arrived. The students were divided into teams of 4, so the first thing they had to do was decide who in their group was going to participate in one of the four individual events (discus, javelin, ring toss, and long jump). The other events, many foot races, everyone that wanted to could participate in. We had the one lap foot race, the 3 lap foot race, the 5 lap foot race, and then some relay races with batons. 

For the individual events, we started with discus. Students stood behind a line (a jumprope) and threw the hula hoop as far as they could. Each student then went and stood where their hoop landed. The student with the farthest throw got the most points for their team. Everyone scored at least 1 point. Because there were six teams, first place scored 6 points, second place 5 points, third place 4 points, and so on.  Then we had all students participate in the 1 lap foot race. We had the boys race first, and then the girls. Students got drinks in between and were encouraged to cheer on their teammates.

The next individual event was the long jump. It was more like a running long jump. We had a jump rope as the marker line where to jump from. Students could run up to that line and attempt to get as far as they could. We then had all students participate in the 3 lap race, boys first and then girls.

We updated the students with their teams scores.

The next individual event was the 'javelin' throw, in which we borrowed some pool noodles from parents. The students ran up to the line (another jump rope) and threw the javelin as far as they could. Next up was the 5 lap event. Many students were already exhausted from running the 1 lap and 3 lap race. I gave them the option of sitting it out, but I also told them those that participated, no matter where they finished would earn points for their team. 

The last individual event was the ring toss. The students competed to see who could score the most points. We then went into the relay race. In the weeks leading up to our Greek Day, I asked parents to send in paper towel rolls. I once again had some great volunteers hot glue the different color ribbons to the paper towel rolls. We used these as batons for the relay races. 

After this, we headed in for restroom breaks and then out to our wonderful Greek feast. 

We had so many parent volunteers help to serve food and brought food in. Some of the food items we had were Greek Salad, olives, various cheeses, grapes, grape juice, roasted lamb, hummus, dried dates and apricots, tzatziki sauce. We even had desserts with baklava, honey cheesecake, and sesame bars. 

We then headed to music to learn a new song. It was the Greek Gods song to the tune of I've been working on the railroad. My kids have been singing it every day since learning it! 

It was then craft time! We used the toilet paper rolls to make olympian torches! For this, we used tea lights, orange, yellow, and red tissue paper, tacky glue and cupcake liners. First I put some tacky glue on a paper plate. I gave each student a toilet paper roll and a gold colored cupcake liner. They glued that cupcake liner to the end of the toilet paper roll. I had prepared the tissue paper by cutting them into 4 x 4 inch squares (approximately). We then glued four yellow pieces of tissue paper to the battery powered tea light, and then four orange pieces of tissue paper on top of that, and then finally 4 pieces of red tissue paper. The tea light can then be placed in the cupcake holder, taken in and out so that you are able to turn the light on and off. 

We then headed out to the garden to perform our Greek myths readers theater. Students had been given the scripts earlier in the week. The kindergarten class came to watch, and my students loved performing!

I created these scripts based off of the Greek myths. This set include five different readers theater scripts. Included in this set are:

* Apollo's Tree-- Daphne and Apollo (7 reading parts over 3 pages)

*Chariot of the Sun God--Phaeton and Helios (7 reading parts over 5 pages)

*The Golden Touch--Midas and Bacchus (5 reading parts over 3 pages)

*The Face in the Pool--Echo and Narcissus (5 reading parts over 3 pages)

*The Weaving Contest-- Arachne and Miverva (6 reading parts over 2 pages)

You can purchase these Greek Myths Readers Theater in my Teachers Pay Teachers shop. 

We then continued on in the Greek fun in having an arm wrestling competition. Students loved this! We had a boy and a girl winner! They earned points for their team!

We finished the day by getting our medals, they are able to be colored, and students took their chitons and went home! What a wonderful day it was celebrating Ancient Greece!

I also created a free reading comprehension passages on the Olympic Games. 

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