Darius 1 preschool lesson

 As we read our homeschool history lesson for the day in the Mystery of History 1*, and Darius 1 was known for fixing the roads in the Babylonian Kingdom and putting in a lot of infrastructure. He was a pretty impressive leader in Ancient history, especially after the craziness of the Babylonians (Future Ticia 2024 says, I need to make a generic Ancient Mesopotamia Unit post, since that’s how I divided the post). Then I remembered how last week over at Mama Smiles there was a post about using painter’s tape to make roads, and I thought that sounds like fun, and I need to remember to do that.

AH HA!  Perfect, so now we got to build our painter’s tape* roads.

This is future Ticia 2017 here, I’ve got a super busy week, and I’d updated this post ages ago, and thought I’d reshare it with you, so this week you get some of my favorites from years ago.

(links marked with an * are affiliate links)

Darius 1 picture used under Creative Commons license, image was cropped, text and overlays added

Helpful Resources for Darius 1 lesson

Okay, Future Ticia 2024 is adding this in. It’s helpful to have some more material for the lesson. We used Mystery of History 1 for our spine back in elementary school, and then for middle/high school I wrote our history lessons because I wanted to focus more on topics not included elsewhere.

Yes, I am extra. However I somehow lost all of my websites I had saved, so I’ll have to add that in later on. So, I’ll just share with you the videos I saved.

First, here is my full Ancient Mesopotamia playlist. This is what I used with my kids for this unit.

First, here is a general overview of Ancient Persia. I enjoy Overly Sarcastic Productions as a fun sarcastic way to get an overview of history or a deep dive. But, it is only for middle school and older.

This is a short summary of who he was and why he was important, only three minutes.

So our Darius 1 preschool lesson was building roads out of painter’s tape

And our roads traveled all over.  It went up a hill.  A very steep hill.

And then the elephants started walking down it.  No wonder he had to do so much maintenance for his roads.  Elephants go down them.

Of course that was the only thing remotely in the correct time period that went down that road.

In the boys’ history of the world, the Star Wars empire came in and contributed their tech.  I don’t know which side they came in on, because these were relatively peaceful soldiers.  They built roads and drove up and down them.

Then they disappeared upstairs and fought EPIC battles to free the galaxy of unwanted scourge.  EPIC

Want some more Babylon ideas?  Maybe learn about the kings before or after Darius 1?

• Hanging Gardens of Babylon
• Xerxes and the Hellespont bridge
• Battle of Marathon
• Queen Esther

This post was originally published in 2011, but was republished.