Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Mythology and Engineering!

There is never a dull moment in room 205, and one of the highlights from the fall has to be our study of Greek Mythology!
We learned what myths are and where they came from. Some students already had a lot of background knowledge about the topic.
 The Common Core expects 4th graders to understand common allusions to Greek mythological characters, such as opening Pandora's Box, or a Herculean task. We analyzed 12 different allusions as we read lots and lots of different Greek myths.
We also used myths to work on summarizing, comparing and contrasting, and analyzing character traits.
Students wrote an "Important Poem" about a mythological character written in the style of Margaret Wise Brown's, The Important Book. They did an awesome job! A smaller group of students worked in their spare time on a reader's theater version of Echo and Narcissus, which they performed for the class. It was fabulous!
 
 Right before vacation we had a very special day. Students had already earned a pajama reading celebration, which was cool in itself, but to top it off, we got to participate in Mrs. Stanbro's engineering challenge in the library, which was inspired by the book Dreaming Up: A Celebration of Building, by Christy Hale. There were a variety of building materials for kids to use to build structures.

The slide show below will show you the mythology poems, and highlights from both building activities. Enjoy! 
 

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6 comments:

  1. Hi! I'm also a 4th grade teacher, and I'm searching for materials to utilize in teaching mythology to my class. Did you create the slides in the pictures above, like the Mythology 101? I was wondering if that is available somewhere, such as Teachers Pay Teachers? Thanks! Dana Mueller

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  2. Me too- do you have your allusions to mythology or a mythology unit for sell anywhere? They look wonderful!!!

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. I did create the SmartBoard slides, but I haven't put my unit for sale because I used components from Nicole Shelby's two Greek Mythology units, both of which I purchased on TPT, and then adapted them to my needs. I may post just the parts that I created as a mythology mini-unit, but in the meantime, check out Nicole's resources and the Scholastic Greek Mythology Mini-Books, which I used as one version of the myths. They are often available when Scholastic has their Dollar Days sales.

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  5. Did you have a organizer that the kids used for the important book idea?

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  6. I am interested in the information that you put on your slides on Greek mythology. I am wanting to use them to introduce a unit that I'm teaching on mythology. May I have a copy of the information along with the mythology 101 cloze reading activity?
    Thank you!

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