The Archaeology of Ancient Greece: Secondary School Resources

Introduction to the project and teaching resources
Within this folder you will find a series of documents about Ancient Greece with a focus on daily life and houses. All of these materials are designed for cross-curricula teaching and cover the English, History, Maths, Science, Geography, and Art subjects of the National Curriculum.

Please do not feel that you have to use all of these files and the associated activities, as they may not all be appropriate for your teaching or timetable. The materials include both background information to the subjects covered, and actual teaching materials, including various activities. These resources were conceived together with the intention of providing teachers with all of the information they would need to teach a topic on daily life in Ancient Greece. Thus some of the activities will require you, as the teacher, to have engaged with all of the background materials within your planning, even if you do not use them directly in your lessons. For example, presentation 20, which provides information and activities for the Science curriculum on Vision and Light, requires you to have read about Greek houses and the family, which is found in presentations 05, 07-10 and 14.

All of the teaching activities have been designed to support the students’ core knowledge and skills as outlined in the National Curriculum. For example, presentation 01 covers the topic of archaeology as a discipline, including what Classical archaeologists study, and where they undertake their excavations. Within this presentation (01) there are two specific activities on slides 3-6. The Kmz* file (02) (for use in Google Earth), and Presentations 03 and 04, extend this topic into Maths and Geography activities that can be done both in and outside the classroom. These activities may be followed by presentation 05, which focuses on the settlement (Olynthus) that provides the basis of many of the other presentations about specific issues regarding houses, daily life and the family in Ancient Greece. Presentation 06 is a LEGO Education activity that is linked to presentations 01 and 05, and develops students’ work in the English, Art and Design subjects of the National Curriculum.