Spending September in Greece

It's hard to imagine that we have already been in class for one month. Nonetheless, our World History students are set to close out the Ancient Greece unit on Monday October 7th. In the month of September we have explored everything from the geography of Greece, the Minoan civilization and Mycenaean civilizations, Athenian democracy, Persian Wars, Golden Age of Athens and Alexander the Great.

It has been a wonderful journey in which students have used a multitude of educational strategies to demonstrate understanding,of what life was like in Ancient Greece. Ms. Blockinger and I want to engage students in our ambitious content. The following assignments/instructional strategies are a few ways we attempted to do just that. The following list reflects our dedication to finding fun and engaging ways to promote higher level thinking for the month of September:

• Wordsplash-format used to review key vocabulary used throughout the unit 
• Venn Diagram-used to review the similarities, differences, and commonalities of the great city-states of Sparta and Athens 
• Speeches-Students wrote speeches from the perspective of a Peloponnesian War hero (objective was to share the causes and effects of the war)
• Musical chairs/Dolls-After researching 35 famous Greeks and 20 Greek gods, students participated in a rousing game of musical dolls. Reminiscent of musical chairs, students passed a rag dolls to music. When the music stopped the person with the doll was given a description of a famous Greek or god, and had to use their knowledge acquired by research to accurately respond
• Storybird.com-Students created children's books that shared their research on the Golden Age of Athens
• Whiteboard Test Review-Students came prepared with study guides, readings, notes, etc to participated in the Whiteboard review. In this review students were asked a question orally, and asked to respond on their whiteboard. At the count of three all students held their boards up to show their answer. This review provided 100% participation from students, reviewed key content, and test format (multiple choices, matching, etc)
• Greece Unit Test-The Students demonstrated their proficiency via a scan-tron assessment on Ancient Greece

It has been quite an exciting month. We look forward to exploring the great Roman Empire in October. As always, feel free to contact us via email with any questions or concerns. If you require additional details about the assignments listed above, all are posted in great detail on PowerSchool.