It's interesting how children from the same family can be so different. I enjoy studying children, especially our own, in order to figure out the best way to reach and teach them. Our oldest is a little more "traditional" than our younger son. He doesn't really like to do much school online. He would rather just read a book about something. "Fluff" doesn't appeal to him. Now, on the other hand, our younger son loves doing school online. He likes activites and doing the extra "fluff" in the lessons. It helps him to understand the material better. That's why I thought that he would like the Ancient Greece Online Unit Study by Techie Homeschool Mom. Guess what? I was right!
He had the choice between ancient Greece, Egypt, or Rome, famous artists, famous inventors, and the solar system. He chose ancient Greece as we have already studied the solar system and inventors. I wasn't too surprised at his choice because his brother has been studying Greek for his high school foreign language and has always been very interested in Greek mythology. It was now our younger son's time to learn all about Greece.
Getting everything going was a little tricky at first, but that was because we had never taken an online course. It was all new to our son as well as to me. We especially had trouble with the Emaze portion of the study. For a project throughout the unit study, our son was to make a "time journal" of all that he learned about Greece. It was a wonderful idea to summarize what he was learning and he enjoyed doing it, when it worked. I had a very difficult time setting up our account and there were days that we couldn't get in to his time journal in order to complete it. Other than "technical difficulties", it was a great activity for him to complete.
The ligistics of actually completing the unit study was diverse. We started the entire study together. I walked him through how to log in, go to where he was in the study, and then we went through each step together. As time went on, he gradually took the reins (so to speak) and worked more and more on his own. Towards the end, he was completely doing everything on his own as I did other things, like teaching his brother. I really liked that he felt confident in his abilities and the structure of how the unit study was set up to work on it independently. That's a big plus for Techie Homeschool Mom! It was very well organized and systematic.
He learned so many things about ancient Greece! It started out with an introduction to just simply talk about the unit study and the technical portions of how it works. It moved on to learning about where Greece is and some basics about ancient Greece. He really liked the activity of using Google maps to find the distance of where we live to where Greece is. This led to our older son soming over to check it out, too! Great! Then they wanted to play around some more with Google maps to "spy" on our home and their grandparents' home. I love when one learning activity leads to others without me pushing it there.
Throughout his "travels" through ancient Greece he learned about Greek city-states, daily life in ancient Greece, city life, Greek art and architecture, ancient Greek innovations, Greek warfare, and Greek mythology. It was funny when he was learning about Greek art. This was a portion that he was doing by himself and he decided to do it in our backyard that day. All of a sudden, I see him looking at something. I asked him what he was doing and he said that he was looking at our pottery because it kind of looked like Greek pottery. He noted some of the aspects of Greek pottery and how our pot fit some of those characteristics. It's wonderful when they can directly apply what they are learning. It makes this mom feel good about what they are doing and that they are actually learning!
Being an online unit study served to be beneficial for the diverse aspects of learning. There were articles to read, articles to listen to, and videos to watch. He learned to click the links of where he needed to go to find the next piece of information. All of the learning and activities weren't all online, though. One of them was to read a book about Greece. Some ideas were given, but we could choose any book that had to do with Greece. I liked this aspect of the unit study. He wasn't online for everything. We chose "Magic Tree House: Hour of the Olympics". Another "offline" activity was to make some Greek clothing. We tried our best with the materials that we had on hand.
Overall, this was a great introduction to the world of online classes for us, even though we had some technical difficulties. Our son learned using the Ancient Greece Online Unit Study by Techie Homeschool Mom. This makes us hopeful to complete some other classes online in the future.
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