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!
