Hi! Future Ticia 2025 here, I’m updating this old history lesson, and getting it all up to date. The second Persian Invasion of Greece was a great lesson, and the kids learned a lot from it. Depending on how you organize your Ancient History lessons, this could be part of either the Ancient Mesopotamia Unit (which includes Persia) OR the Ancient Greece Unit. I now return you to Past Ticia 2011.
I mentioned briefly last week that I found a cool new site thanks to All Things Beautiful, well this week we really got to make use of it for homeschool history lesson and this is now my boys’ favorite type of lesson (future Ticia here, even at 11 their favorite type of lesson still involves these paper soldiers). The Persian invasion of Greece was the perfect lesson to try out the paper soldiers with.
And, I also mentioned to Jeff that I thought I was spending too much time there. He mumbled something about way too much time looking at the different army figures.
And then, I spent way too much time cutting out a lot of figures. Seriously, they’re way too cool! WAY TOO COOL!
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How did the Persian invasion of Greece go?
Before we undertook to invade Greece, we read the lesson in our Mystery of History 1 textbook.
We set up the armies (the paper soldiers were set up in play dough). Xerxes decided to avenge his father’s failure and head over to conquer those uppity Greeks, but he wasn’t going to repeat the same mistake his father made.
Oh no, he was going to make all new mistakes. Mainly long supply lines (a la the Hellespont Bridge, a genius of engineering, but terrible for supplies), think the Napoleon when he fought the Russians in 1812, which Natalie so nicely pointed out was the REAL big battle going on at the time in the world.
And, so he ran off to conquer the Greeks, and it was going well for him, mostly.
Like most would-be conquerors, he forgot that a man fighting for his home fights much harder than a man fighting for treasure and glory.
That, and it’s very easy to defend a small pass against a large army and cause the large army huge amounts of casualties.
Of course, the coolest part for me was when Jeff came home that night, and the boys excitedly showed Jeff the battle and how it went. Mind, every battle has to have a good guy and a bad guy, so that can get complicated.
Who would you say is the bad guy in this battle? My boys definitely picked sides. All in all, this made for a fun Ancient history lesson.
Future Ticia 2025 is back! I’m back to put in all the other stuff I want in this post, like more resources, so let’s put some cool resources in here, then I’m heading to bed, because I decided to work on updating this right before bedtime, which was a mistake.
Second Persian invasion of Greece resources
Okay, let’s find a video for you guys. There are some really long videos, like over an hour long, and I opted NOT to share those, but I do have one that is great for middle schoolers.
I always find these videos funny, though they are not always accurate, and now I’m trying to remember if I missed anything in this video that wasn’t accurate…
I’m going to share this next one, though I haven’t rewatched it. I have a vague memory of watching it back when we last studied the time period, but it’s been five years. I like Invicta’s videos.
I thought I was going to be able to suggest some books for you, but for right this moment, I’m not finding any books. So, I’m going to have to research this some more.
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