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The second Persian invasion
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 Jeff 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, first 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.
Want to learn more about the Greeks and the Persians?
Comments
12 responses to “The second Persian invasion”
I have to check out that site. Very cool!
It is a cool site, but it can get overwhelming, especially if you have boys that want to know the accurate step-by-step movements of the troops. I keep trying to get them involved in the story and the general idea and that it was too long ago for us to know exactly how it went…you know how it is when kids get these ideas. I love they way you were able to do it just as a lovely story.
It is so much fun when our children have so much fun in a lesson like this. I haven't checked out the site, it sounds way too cool!
Those soldiers look awesome! Your boys must have LOVED this lesson!
What an interesting way to present history, especially for boys. How did you make a playmat?
I think my C would love to learn this way, but I'd have to get daddy to do the teaching as I don't know anything about all these battles! Just reading the instructions on one of them completely confused me! But I think he'd love to do something like this with C so I'll definitely share it with them.
I've got to check that site out!
Really cool! Looks like you guys are really getting into it. I love it. I am going to have to check out this site.
Actually the funny part, was the boys showing me Xerxes invasion of Asia minor from Israel. Not quite how I remembered it, but they were enthusiastic. The mat is from a biblical history class that basically maps out the mediteranian Works for lots of things (no labels, lets it be used flexibly).
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