just another morning here

To mark the end of our Ancient Greeks project we had a Greek feast this evening. I don’t think the recipes were particularly ancient, just Greek, but that’s good enough for me. Steve’s Aunty Jacky came round for most of the afternoon and cooked with the girls, then we ate it all for tea. Well, to be fair, the kids and Steve tried it all and then I ate most of it, as none of them liked it much – so guess what I’ll be eating for the rest of the week

They made Domatosoupa (tomato soup, if you couldn’t guess!), followed by Spanakopita (spinach pie – although we made little tarts instead) with Xoriatiki (Greek salad), then Baklava for pudding. Abbie and I both liked the soup, and I think everyone liked the spinach pies, but only Joe and I ate the salad. Pudding was an all round hit though

Steve was not impressed at having his photo taken (and yes, that Unfortunate Events poster is still up in the conservatory, a whole month later … ). The kids loved using their greek pots to eat from!

Haven’t done much else today other than more washing and playing with the children. Anyway, for my benefit and in case anyone with an early years Home Ed website fancies nicking it for an easy page addition, here is a round up of the things we have done for the Ancient Greeks project:

General resources:
Story of the World – Ancient times – story book and related activity pages
Groovy Greeks book and audio CD (part of the Horrible Histories series)
BBC Schools Ancient Greece resources
BBC schools video – Ancient Greeks
C4 schools video – Eureka! The Ancient Greeks
Ginn Primary History book – The Ancient Greeks … and some other schooly books borrowed from our resources centre, can’t find links for any of these though!
I Wonder Why Greeks Built Temples
Theseus and the Minotaur, Jason and the Argonauts, The Wooden Horse of Troy
C4 Learning Ancient Greeks Ideas Today website

Specific activities we did:
Looking at family trees – our own, and then the Greek gods family tree.
Mapwork from Story of the World
Greek Gods activities from the C4 site
Looking at the Greek alphabet and comparing/contrasting it with ours. Writing our names using Greek letters.
Key patterns – observing them on Greek artefacts, then making our own.
Looking for evidence – using photographs of Greek artefacts we asked ‘how do we know what the ancient Greeks were like’ and found some answers from the pictures.
Prime numbers activities using Eratosthenes’ Sieve – again, from the C4 site
Colouring pictures from Story of the World activity book
Painting – whatever the children wanted to do – we did key patterns, pictures of Gods and inspired by mythical stories.
Storytelling and the oral tradition – reading greek myths, making up our own greek stories
Poetry – talked about Homer’s Iliad and they read some poems – dramatically!
Theseus and the Minotaur maze from Story of the World activity book
Ancient Greek fashions – including dressing up and greek dancing
Making and decorating papier mache greek pots
Cooking – greek recipes from EatGreekTonight.com.

Other things we could still do as extension activities (or to add to my 4 year rolling programme ) if we wanted to:
Aesops fables, more Greek Myths, Pythagoras’ theorem, square and triangular numbers … and ideally go back to the British Museum sometime before too long!

Phew, well, I think that’s about enough education for one day’s blogging, but I just wanted to pull it together into one place so that it was easily accessible – I feel that we worked relatively hard on it together so it’s nice to have something to show for it – and I didn’t really plan any of it, we just gathered it together and did stuff as we went along, before I get labelled!! Must give credit to Aunty Jacky too, who spent loads of time with the girls on it all, which is just lovely for them and for me. We’ll have to have a think about what project to do next, although I’m not starting anything until after Melrose/half term/Animated Exeter activities are over.

Ah, Melrose. Must write a list, and remember to fill in my own baked potato poll before I forget

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 30th, 2005 at 20:40 and is filed under cookery, general, projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.