Holmgate Primary School and Nursery

Has Greece always been in the news?

 

Welcome to Japan's class page all about Ancient Greece!

Greek Day!

We were very lucky to have Portals to the Past come in and deliver us an amazing Greek Day! 

 

Our day began with a Greek quiz in the hall, which had loads of fun facts for the children to discover!

We were also transported to a Greek theatre where we re-enacted Greek myths and legends.

We then placed Archimedes' Stomachion - the oldest known mathematical puzzle, as well as Petteia - a Greek strategy game.-

 

After lunch, a Greek warrior then demonstrated his weapons and armour. We also took part in a mini-Olympic games! It was great fun!

 

 

Our topic lessons...

In art, we will be making Greek pots, so we started our topic lessons by investigating different types of Greek pots  and what they were used for! We looked at Hydria, Lekythos and Amphora pot shapes. 

 

 Theseus and the Minotaur: is there any evidence for the legend?

We investigated if we think the story of Theseus and the Minotaur was real. As part of this lesson, we became detectives and looked for clues around the classroom to see if the myth was true or not. We found pictures of ancient artefacts with carvings of the weapon Theseus used to defeat the Minotaur,  as well as maps which showed that the myth was based in a real place. 

 

 

Our geography investigation...

We did a brilliant geography investigation where we investigated the question:

Should we go on holiday to Greece? 

We started the day by writing everything down that we already knew about the country of Greece and why we think Greece is a popular holiday destination. We found this difficult because it was before we did any of our research! 

 

We then split our investigation into four steps...

Step 1: Finding physical features

As part of this step, we used atlases to search for some of Greece's physical features (such as mountains and rivers) and then used this knowledge to decode why we might want to holiday in Greece.

 

Step 2: Finding human features

As part of this step, we went on Nearpod to research what human features we could find in Greece. This included shops, restaurants and even water parks! Nearpod works in a way which is similar to Google Street View, and allows us to explore a new locations using the iPads.

Step 3: Asking questions/travelling to Greece

For this step, we split the class into two halves. The first half of the class were asking questions they wanted to know before deciding if they want to holiday in Greece. They then used Swiggle (a child-friendly search engine) to research their answers. 

The second group were focused on how travelling to Athens. They used Google maps to research and evaluate different modes of transport. Did you know it would take us 26 days if we wanted to walk to Athens from Holmgate?

 

Step 4: Conclusion

For the final part of the day, we summed up our findings. We concluded which human and physical features would make us want to visit Greece the most (unsurprisingly,water parks featured a lot in our answers!) We then wrote a final paragraph tying together all of our research. 

 

 

Our art lessons...

In art, we will be using clay to  practise making different types of pots. So far, we have had a go at making coil pots. 

 

 

 We then had a go at making at clay pinch pots. We added two handles to our pots so they were similar to the Amphora Greek pot style. It was tricky, but we gave it a good go!

For our final vases, we could chose whether we wanted to create an amphora or hydria vase. They were much bigger than our practise vases, but we took our time and the results are fantastic. Well done everyone - we are fantastic potters!
To see how we made our vases, click here

 

Celebration of learning...

I also want to say a big THANK YOU to everybody who attended our celebration of learning on the last day of term. We hope everyone was proud of all of our hard work this term!