Exploring Ancient Greece and Greek Mythology

In our Sonlight core 1 right now we are deep into ancient Greece and Greek Mythology. What fun Zach and I have been having with this!

I actually got very lucky in that Zach picked up from the bookstore over the summer a fiction book that has a mythology theme, The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1), which is part of a series. He has since went on to read the next couple in the series, and loved those as well. If you have an advanced reader and are doing mythology, those may be very fun for you as well, to do a comparison of where the author got the characters, how much is "factual" (well, at least an accurate rendition of the mytho), and how much is Riordan's own imagination and expansion of the character and so forth.

In the free realm, the internet is, of course, full of facts, games, websites, "educational" material (some yes, some no) and everything else you could want about Greek Myths. I did some major searching last week for a few select sites for Zach to explore. He loves the computer, and loves games. I wanted to connect that love of the computer with some reinforcement with what we were learning. One site I found that I really liked for content and style, and Zach really liked for the fun factor was Adventures in Ancient Greece. It has too much content for me to list it all, but it had a god/goddess Greek/Roman name matching with what they oversaw, a nice map, exploration of different areas and a quiz at the end where Zach had great fun proving how much he knew, with no prompting by me to take the quiz. :)

And right now both boys (ages 7 and 4) are deeply engrossed in a mythology audio CD Greek Myths, thus giving me the time to write this post. LOL. We all love Jim Weiss. We have seen and heard him in person each year now for 3 or 4 years at the California Homeschool Network Family Expo in Ontario, California. He is such a fantastic storyteller, and we have purchased several of his CDs. I really can't recommmend them highly enough, highly educational and highly entertaining. Our minivan always has a few stashed, and usually one in the CD player.

Back to some more interactive schooling for Zach and I as his CD winds up, but I wanted to share these resources, as I benefit greatly from all the blogs and posts of other homeschoolers sharing tips and sites with me to make education really come alive for students.