Putting together a unit study often feels very daunting and time consuming, so we were interested in trying out the Techie Homeschool Mom’s Ancient Greece Online Unit Study. Read on for our full review and to see if it’s right for your family.
Ancient Greece Online
Ancient Greece Online Unit Study is aimed at students in mid-elementary to middle school and is a digital resource that is housed on Teachable. First you make an account on Techie Homeschool Mom, and then you make your purchase through her site. Next you sign up with Teachable to access the course there. It sounds a little confusing, but after you’ve done this you only need to use Teachable to access the course. If you already have your own Teachable account, I would suggest setting up a second one specifically for your children, which I didn’t think about doing so their course is in among my own courses.
Within the Ancient Greece unit study are the following units:
- Introduction to Ancient Greece
- Ancient Greek City-States
- Daily Life in Ancient Greece
- City Life in Ancient Greece
- Greek Arts & Architecture
- Greek Innovations
- Greek Warfare
- Greek Mythology
- Host a Greek Symposium
Each unit should take about 2-3 hours, depending upon the speed of your children’s reading, the time spent on the hands-on projects, etc.
Hands-On Ancient Greece projects
- Experiment: Archimedes Principle
- Greek Pottery
- Fried Pancakes with Honey and Sesame Seeds
- Hoplite Shield
- Spartan Sword
- Greaves
- Greek Temple Model
- Greek Costume
Materials Needed
Before beginning this unit study, I didn’t know which supplies would be needed, so if you are able to plan ahead a little, it will give you more time to source the supplies. There are a choice of books to read, and supplies for the hands-on activities, all of which can be found in the introduction area of the course. We had to order a second-hand book online and wait for it to be delivered as the library system where we were didn’t have anything suitable.
How We Used The Ancient Greece Unit Study
Because we were waiting for our book to arrive and the children didn’t want to wait to get started, they began right away reading the linked articles and watching the videos. Before I knew it, the had started off going through a unit a day! But as that was without the daily novel reading (my children chose to read, Nobody’s Princess) and without the projects. So that did cut down the time quite a bit. But they were enjoying learning and if they were into it, I didn’t want to break their momentum.
Once Nobody’s Princess arrived, I took the opportunity to use this as our read aloud book so we could all enjoy the book and talk about it together. To date, we’re about half way through the book, and it’s a great choice with a strong female main character who has a good heart and stands up for fairness and fights for what she wants and sees as unjust. In each unit there is a ‘book club’ assignment to answer a short question about the book you are reading and leave it as a comment inside the course. The children are now catching up on their Book Club assignments by answering the questions every couple of days.
Also within each unit, students make a time travel journal entry using an online journal they create as part of the course through Emaze. This digital journal is working well for my son who is not a fan of writing in a book, but thinks it’s cool to design one online. He has already decided he will create another for an upcoming overseas trip to document his activities.
As I mentioned above, there are several hands-on activities that can be done as a part of this course. Tristan and Kallista have done a few of them over the past 5 weeks.
The first activity the children set up themselves was an experiment for the Archimedes Principle (see egg photo above).
And of course, my children love everything to do with food and love trying out new recipes. Kallista made the yummy fried pancakes with honey and sesame seeds. They turned out very well and the children want to have them again.
Tristan and Kallista enjoy crafting and they put their pottery skills to use. Tristan told me he brought in his knowledge of arches as well to enable his handle to work.
Final Thoughts
My children love learning about world cultures and I like it when they can work on classes and projects together. This course is mainly pieced together by pulling in resources from other sites, which is good, but I do wish there was a little more content on-site. This didn’t bother my children, though. I liked bringing in the novel, and the kids thought the online journal entries were a novel idea. The flexibility of this course is great – it can be done in a big marathon session of a couple of days, or be drawn out to a couple of sessions weekly for two months. This would also make a good summer project for children (our own summer project will be Vincent Van Gogh Online Unit Study).
Read 60 reviews from the Homeschool Review Crew about Techie Homeschool Mom on Ancient Greece, as well as many of the other unit studies she has. If you’d like to know more or would like to follow Techie Homeschool Mom, you can connect with her through her website, Facebook ,Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram.
