Hercules and Achelous - The Lesser Adventures of Hercules

This lesson was designed my students studying OCR GCSE Classical Civilisation Myth and Religion.

It’s fully dual coded to reduce cognitive load, enhance engagement and aid knowledge retention - we’ve found our students really like this style and they find it helps them access the content more readily.

The lesson starts with a video reminding them why Hercules is famous, before launching into the story of Hercules and his fight with Achelous over princess Deianira of Aitolia.

Primary source work is included throughout as students are presented with passages from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and are prompted with challenging questions associated with them. They can answer these verbally or in their books depending on the type of class you have and students you teach.

The lesson will fit quite neatly into 1 hour and it finishes with a video where students are encouraged to listen to the original text from Ovid being read aloud, and use this to add more detail to their answers, followed finally by some peer assessment.

There are coloured overlays on all the slides to help any students with Irlen’s / Dyslexia but these can easily be deleted if you don’t need them.

Thanks so much for taking a look :-)