Greece Unit

I was going through my posts and realized we completed our Greece Unit over five years ago and I haven’t written about it. I kept putting it off because I wanted to write individual posts for some of the topics, but I need to stop putting it off. So, significantly later, here is my Greece Unit to add to our geography lessons and I’m one step closer to the Europe Unit being done.

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Greece Unit resources

Greece has a lot of resources. It’s one of the big-name countries that pretty much everyone can name. Many ideals baked into American history and culture come from Ancient Greece, so I have a lot to share with you.

I’ll take a quick moment and share some.

• National Geographic Kids: Greece
• Greece Facts for Kids
• 109 Facts about Greece

As you are no doubt surprised to learn, there are a plethora of places with facts and information on Greece, so I picked two sites I know and trust, and then one that had lots of facts and some decent pictures.

Greece booklist

I left out most of the Ancient Greece books, since I have an Ancient Greece booklist. So, that is why after saying I had loads of books, I have less than 20 Greece books.

I tried a different editing technique on the picture, “Fancy Focus,” and I’m not a fan. Won’t be doing that again.

• Let’s visit Greece– out of print, but you can find a similar book at your library
• The Orphan: a Cinderella story from Greece– I forgot about this book, it’s a fun take on this classic story
• The Great Alexander the Great– Greece is arguing it out with North Macedonia over who gets to claim him
• Mount Olympus basketball– I love this take on Greek mythology, it was fun
• Diogenes– a hilarious take on this ancient Greek philosopher
• I have an olive tree– I forgot about this book, Eve Bunting always makes great books and this tribute to Greek heritage is another homerun
• The Prince and the Golden Ax– I love finding lesser-known tales, and I didn’t know this one before we read the book
• There’s a Monster in the Alphabet– a story of how we got the Phoenician alphabet to Greece
• Summer Birds: the butterflies of Maria Merian– a cute story of how a girl disproved a common believe about butterflies
• The dress and the girl– a young girl in Greece wears her favorite dress and finds it years later in a thrift store, I love small stories like this and I need to check and see if I have it on my immigration booklist.
• The fabled life of Aesop– I don’t know if I quite agree with the back cover “a child bore into slavery in ancient Greece found a way to speak out against injustice,” I don’t know if that was necessarily the intended goal, it’s making him sound like he had a bigger plan than I think he actually did, that being said, the stories are good, not my favorite illustration style
• What floats in a moat– A funny take on how Archimedes discovered buoyancy
• The Trojan Horse: how the Greeks won the war– The Step Into Reading books are such a great series and have such a good text and illustrations

Greece videos

I could probably watch this video a couple of times while writing this post, it’s rather short.

And yes Barb, because he’s totally going to read this, I of course got the reference at the start of the video.

And here is the Flag Friday Greece.

Greece Unit recipe:

I have to come back and figure out what we made. This was one that Batman found the recipe in one of his cookbooks, so I have to dig through his memory bin to tell you about our recipe from this time around.

Previously we made gyros, kind of, sort of, but not really. I may fold that post into this one.

Oh man, they just showed the pictures of some other location I didn’t grab pictures of for the post. Seriously, so many cool places to visit in Greece.

Focus Ticia!

Back to writing the Greece Unit.

I’m going to schedule this for Friday, and in theory will come back with the other recipe.

Greece Unit notebooking pages

We filled out the Europe notebooking pages, AND we had some minibooks. I haven’t had minibooks for years. I exaggerate. But not really.

Greece minibooks (JOIN MY NEWSLETTER to get access to the subscriber page) included:

• Sink or float- for Archimedes (Archimedes lesson)
• Aesop minibook
• Greek philosophers
• Trojan War
• Greek gods and goddesses
• Heracles- I really don’t know why I had one just for Hercules, but I did

Let’s see, for some reason I did not write a lot of fun fun facts:

• one of the oldest currencies still in use
• never more than 85 miles from the sea
• so many inventions from there
• most of the notable people listed are from BC, which amused me

Wow, I’m kind of surprised, I’m almost done writing and I still have like a minute or so left of the video. Admittedly, I haven’t written the recipe yet…..

Some other learning ideas

I did end up finishing the video, and watched the Flag Friday. Now to pick out some useful things, I’m going to share some Ancient History lessons.

• Darius 1
• Irrigation system
• STEM challenge: Design an aqueduct (which reminds me I need to write about the Greek columns STEM challenge)
• Fresco art style lesson
• Stonehenge lesson