Homeschool Field Trips in Greece (Day 19)

I would be remiss if I did not start this blog post by thanking teachers everywhere, but especially the ones who have taught our children, for their incredible dedication, talent, and creativity. I had so many people helping me plan this home school curriculum, and I now have a much deeper appreciation of all the work that goes into being a stellar teacher. We are just a few weeks into this trip, and I already feel like I know our children as learners in a much deeper, more thorough way. Early on in the trip, the kids decided that they would call me, as their teacher, Mrs. Butterball. I have no idea where this came from, but I decided to roll with it! Here are the kids in their first day of homeschool with Mrs. Butterball.

Starting the trip with Greece allowed us to do a deep dive into Greek Mythology over the summer to get in the mood. The kids were already fans of Greek Myths, and I decided to try The Odyssey. Mary Pope Osborne (of Magic Tree House fame) has a wonderful 2 book adaptation of the classic. It is about 400 pages in total — the kids devoured the story! We often stayed up well past bedtime last summer for just one more chapter. We didn’t want to leave Odysseus in distress on an island, with his men turned into swine or lashed under the belly of a sheep escaping the Cyclops.

I found interesting “field trips” in each of the places we spent time in Greece. The children are doing surprisingly well with workbooks, writing, reading comprehension, spelling lists, and math activities. But there is something special about hands on activities. Inspired by the mosaics of Delos, we spent an afternoon learning how to make mosaics.

Hugh created Zeus’ lightning bolt; Hazel did a typical Greek house; I did an octopus; Costanza, our wonderful au pair — and the most artistic of all of us — did a pattern from Delos; Gail, my mother-in-law, did a bird. The process is a slow one; it involves placing small pieces of glass with tweezers. The gorgeous mosaics in Delos were all designed by a handful of people but created by hundreds of workers. Here are our the final creations:

In Athens, we spent the morning learning about the ancient Olympic Games and had the opportunity to compete amongst ourselves. Watching our 5-year-old run with an actual javelin may have caused my heart to skip a beat, but we all had a wonderful time! We learned that the earliest Olympic Games were only for men, and that everyone competed naked, partially to ensure that they were all men. We heard a story about a mother who had trained her athlete son. She decided to attend the games dressed as a male trainer. When the organizers of the games found out about this, they decided that all trainers who attended had to be naked too!

Hugh has already asked if he can have Discus lessons when we get home!

In Athens, I also found a wonderful treasure hunt. The game began with a letter from Archimedes, the famous mathematician who discovered how volume worked while in the bathtub and shouted Eureka as he ran naked through the streets.

We arrived at a set location to find a note from Archimedes, along with a bottle with only a secret container inside. How were we going to get the secret container out of the bottle? The hole at the top of the bottle was too small to put your hands in. The kids quickly figured out that we could pour water into the bottle to get the container to float to the top. The container had a key for a locker, in which we found a backpack, with a map and clues inside. We went all over Athens on foot, looking for clues and decoding street signs. We had boxes to unlock, numbers to find using black light, and coordinates to locate. The backpack included a beautifully crafted wooden board that we used to decode a secret message from Archimedes. The word was Democracy. (A big theme in our time in Greece has been its role as the birthplace of democracy!)

From an educational perspective, Greece was the perfect place to start this adventure. It was wonderful to see all the stories we had read come alive, from sailing through the Cycladic Islands and thinking of Odysseus, pining for Penelope and Ithaca, to discovering perfect triangles at Delos, created wherever a lightning bolt had struck, a gift from Zeus. A guide told us that Mykonos (which translates to ‘pile of rocks’) was created by Athena throwing rocks down to Hercules to help him bury the Titans, and Hugh’s face came alive, as Hercules is a favorite.

Finally, I decided to throw some map reading skills into Athens. We would give Hazel the map and let her lead us to our desired location or restaurant. She did surprisingly well. We let her take as may wrong turns as she needed, so we saw a few surprising neighborhoods, but she always found her way to where we needed to go (and we only had to call one restaurant to tell them we were going to be late!)

In addition to studying each country with the kids, I am also reading about all of the places we are going. If you are a fan of Greek Mythology, and have not yet read it, I highly recommend Madeline Miller’s Circe. It is wonderfully creative, beautifully written, and hard to put down.