A Journey Through Ancient Greece
Posted by Vincent O'Hara“The unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates changed the course of history by challenging the status-quo, pushing his students to ask the difficult questions to find true knowledge. The 6th-grade Humanities students have spent this school year examining how ancient cultures shaped the modern world we live in today, and our most recent travels through time whisked us across the Mediterranean from ancient Egypt to Greece. The students explored how geography separated the people, making each Greek city-state a unique civilization, and how the competition among them was the driving force behind the innovations in government, military, philosophy, and the arts that scholars cite as Greece’s great legacy. As a class, we read Greek mythology, which offers a glimpse into the people of the time’s spiritual beliefs and understanding of nature. Furthermore, the students completed a research project on a mythological character, some demigod and some beast. As extra credit, some students even dressed as their characters!
As a culminating assignment, our 6th-grade scholars are completing a five-paragraph essay responding to a document-based question on what they believe are ancient Greece’s most innovative contributions to Western civilization. In the spirit of Socrates, we know there isn’t one answer, but a little argument couldn’t hurt, right?
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