Ancient Greece: The Parthenon

We had a lot of fun studying the Parthenon.  Making one was not too difficult.  It took a long time to save up enough toilet paper rolls and the actual instructions were for 50 paper towel rolls.  We don't use paper towels and we were ready for the Parthenon when I only had 33 toilet paper rolls, so we fudged and made everything smaller.  I'm glad we did.  It was plenty of work and hands-on experiential education with what we did.

 Boys.

 First we painted the tubes white.  Then we covered two of my large cookie sheets with foil to form a base.  Cardboard would have worked better, but I didn't have anything large enough on hand.

 The ionic columns is why I was glad we only used about 28 toilet paper rolls.  The column tops took awhile.

 Oh look, Mom has the camera out.

 Hide and seek.

 Sorry, this poster is getting a little distracted.

 She's just so cute!

To be perfectly honest the children and I didn't make the roof.  I couldn't figure out how from the instructions and by the end of the afternoon my kids were ready to move onto something else.  My hubby made a roof for it that night and the kids oohed and aahed over the completed project the next morning when they woke up and saw it.

 Along with making the Parthenon, we skimmed through this book: The Parthenon: How it was Built and How it was Used by Peter Chrisp.  There was loads too much info for my younger learners but everyone loved the pictures and I read about 1/3 of the text and that was about right.  Miriam read more on her own.

We also read Ancient Greece: 40 Hands-On Activities to Experience this Wondrous Age by Avery Hart and Paul Mantell from pg. 62-71.  

After all that the kids watched a 60 minute video about the Parthenon on youtube.  This one didn't cover much of the history but spent the bulk of the time talking about how hard it is to put the Parthenon back together because the architecture was so complex and sophisticated.  It watched like a science video almost and my older three kids loved it.  If you want to watch it, here's a link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLCW0zKR4xk

I had so many grand plans for Greece but then my baby got the flu and then I caught the flu and now we are in full-on sick mode.  Hopefully I feel well enough tomorrow to do some of the things I had planned.  I can't keep adding weeks to Greece because we really need to start science on Monday to make sure we have everything taught/learned for the two water field trips I've set up.

Greece though, is fun, and you could spend a whole lot of time studying it with no lack of fun ideas and interesting content.