Don’t get lost in the minotaur’s maze as you study ancient Minoans

We are heading back to ancient history this coming year in our history lessons, and this past week I’ve been working on my plans for the Minoans. I remembered how much fun we had with our Minoan lessons, and our great attempt at learning how to be bull jumpers (that went as well as you can expect), and knew I needed to look at it again.

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Flask back to what started our Minoan lessons

We read the lesson on Minoans in our Mystery of History 1 book, and it’s good, but I wanted to do more this time.  I looked ahead in our Illuminations {affiliate link} lesson plans and the next week was Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.  Excellent, we’d covered that pretty thoroughly in our study of Genesis.  So, I did a quick review and headed back to the Minoans.

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Minoan Lesson 1: Read Theseus and the Minotaur

I’ve been rereading the Percy Jackson series (I’m thinking of having the kids listen to the book as our next audiobook), so I think some of this is my having the Minoans on my mind and how crazy King Minos was…….

{Completely unrelated, but I’m super excited,The House of Hades is coming out soon, and I can’t wait!, ok back to the post}

But, we started off all these Minoan lessons by reading two versions of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Here’s the exact editions we used {Amazon links, one is not available on Amazon}: Usborne Illustrated Guide to Greek Myths and Legends and Greek Myths.  They both told slightly different versions which opened up the discussion of oral tradition and passing down stories that way.

As a side point, Theseus is rather callous, and doesn’t come off well in this story.

This of course lead to:

Minoan Lesson 2: Build your own Minotaur Maze

I gave the kids a time limit of “however long it takes me to make lunch” to create their mazes, with the rules:

1. The mini-figure has to be able to walk through the maze.
2. Your maze must be completely enclosed.
3. There must be a monster at the center of your maze.

Pretty simple, I wanted to give them space in this lesson to do other things.  This was obviously one of their favoriteMinoans lessons.

 

I particularly loved Superman’s maze.  He included so many details, including skeletons of previous people who’d entered the maze and not succeeded.  A jail for people, and a rather innovative minotaur.

Afterwards, we talked about how the legend of the minotaur probably came from:

Minoan lesson 3: Bull Jumping

Yes, they took the idea of bullfighting even further and would jump over the bulls and do all sorts of crazy stunts.  This idea actually features rather prominently in Taliesin (The Pendragon Cycle, Book 1) {affiliate link, have to include Pendragon Cycle so you know the name of the series, I read that so much in college, skews my thinking of Atlantis legends somewhat}.

Back to the Minoan lesson and bull jumping.  We weren’t going to jump real bulls, I know such a downer.  So, we went to a local park with some building stuff and had at it.

There wasn’t really any profit from the bull leaping unless you count the energy my kids burned before we went to lunch.  But, we all had lots of fun.  The kids all decided it’s hard to leap over bulls, even if they’re standing still and only 2.5 feet tall.  They couldn’t imagine doing it with a real bull.  I figure the bulls they were using were smaller than ours of today because I can’t imagine how you do it with the cows of today.

 

Minoan lesson 4: Watch Atlantis

Our final lesson and the one we’re going to do today is watching Atlantis – The Lost Empire.  I love this movie, if the kids were older and we’d already watched Stargate SG-1, we’d watch Stargate Atlantis, but that’s a good 60 hours worth of TV, so that’s not gonna happen anytime soon.

 

Bonus Minoan lesson for older kids: read the original writings of Atlantis

Plato, the Greek Philosopher first wrote about Atlantis, and that would make a great internet search for older kids to look into.  Start at the Wikipedia page for Atlantis, and go from there.

Okay, totally adding that into my work in progress of Ancient Mediterranean Cultures Unit (Minoans and Phoenicians).

 

More we’ll be doing as part of our study of Ancient History

Originally published September 24, 2013