Ancient Civilizations: Studying Ancient Greece

Hello Friends!  Unfortunately, it's a cloudy and cool first day of Spring Break in my neck of the woods. Fortunately, that gives me an opportunity to stay indoors and finally blog a post or two. 

I'm hoping to document some of what my third graders have been into this year before we say goodbye to the school year.  Has time been on fast forward for you? 

It seems like it goes by faster each year.  

Our state standards in the area of Social Studies have changed and now we are responsible for teaching five different Ancient Civilizations.  We have recently finished up the study of Ancient Greece. 

One of the first things I do in preparation for teaching anything in the content areas, is check out a wide variety of books on the subject.  My kids love picking books to read from our classroom library section.  For the study of Greece, I also added myths and Aesop's fables.  Aesop was a Greek slave who was believed to have told these short stories to teach his listeners lessons. 

We continue to add sections to our learning logs.  Students will go home with a journal that is stuffed with all the science and social studies learning we have done this year.  

It is the first year I have put all of it together in one journal but I really like having it all in one place!

Their journal notes serve as their study guides for our unit tests.  

I like to have my students read and write through the social studies curriculum. 

We continue to work on paragraphing using main ideas and details. We use a table organizer for this with the main idea as the table top and the details as the legs that hold up or support it.   I scaffold the instruction by giving students a bank of words that can and should be used.  They work on combining words to form sentences that will support their topic sentence.  

For this final activity, students decorated an orange pot with a scene from Ancient Greece. 

Then they described what they discovered about Ancient Greece by writing about it.  We hung these up as a way to remember all that we learned. 

Writing postcards for one of the ancient Civilizations was another way we concluded our Ancient Civilization unit.  Students needed to pretend they were a visitor in Ancient Greece and write about what they saw and did.

Finally, students partnered up and were given a bridge map to contrast a relating factor of two of the ancient civilizations that we have studied so far. 

Some of the relating factors were location and physical characteristics. 

Others were architecture and contributions. 

I've added a Greece file to my TPT store. It includes all the teaching slides and pages for learning logs. 

You can check it out here if interested: 

Ancient Greece Teaching Bundle