Hands on Minoan lesson plans

We read the lesson on Minoans in Mystery of History, and it’s good, but I wanted to do more this time.  I looked ahead in our Illuminations {affiliate link} lesson plans and the next week was Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.  Excellent, we’d covered that pretty thoroughly in our study of Genesis.  So, I did a quick review and headed back to the Minoans.

{This post contains affiliate links.  See my full Disclosure statement for more information}

Minoan Lesson 1: Read Theseus and the Minotaur

I’ve been rereading the Percy Jackson series, so I think some of this is my having the Minoans on my mind and how crazy King Minos was…….

{Completely unrelated, but I’m super excited,The House of Hades is coming out soon, and I can’t wait!, ok back to the post}

But, we started off all these Minoan lessons by reading two versions of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Here’s the exact editions we used {Amazon links, one is not available on Amazon}: Usborne Illustrated Guide to Greek Myths and Legends and Greek Myths.  They both told slightly different versions which opened up the discussion of oral tradition and passing down stories that way.

As a side point, Theseus is rather callous, and doesn’t come off well in this story.

This of course lead to:

Minoan Lesson 2: Build your own Minotaur Maze

I gave the kids a time limit of “however long it takes me to make lunch” to create their mazes, with the rules:

1. The mini-figure has to be able to walk through the maze.
2. Your maze must be completely enclosed.
3. There must be a monster at the center of your maze.

Pretty simple, I wanted to give them space in this lesson to do other things.  This was obviously one of their favorite Minoans lessons.

I partiuclarly loved Superman’s maze.  He included so many details, including skeletons of previous people who’d entered the maze and not succeeded.  A jail for people, and a rather innovative minotaur.

Afterwards we talked about how the legend of the minotaur probably came from:

Minoan lesson 3: Bull Jumping

Yes, they took the idea of bull fighting even further, and would jump over the bulls and do all sorts of crazy stunts.  This idea actually features rather prominently in Taliesin (The Pendragon Cycle, Book 1) {affiliate link, have to include Pendragon Cycle so you know the name of the series, I read that so much in college, skews my thinking of Atlantis legends somewhat}.

Back to the Minoan lesson and bull jumping.  We weren’t going to jump real bulls, I know such a downer.  So, we went to a local park with some building stuff, and had at it.

There wasn’t really any profit from the bull leaping, unless you count the energy my kids burned before we went to lunch.  But, we all had lots of fun.  The kids all decided it’s hard to leap over bulls, even if they’re standing still and only 2.5 feet tall.  They couldn’t imagine doing it with a real bull.  I figure the bulls they were using were smaller than ours of today, because I can’t imagine how you do it with the cows of today.

Minoan lesson 4: Watch Atlantis

Our final lesson, and the one we’re going to do today is watch Atlantis – The Lost Empire.  I love this movie, if the kids were older and we’d already watched Stargate SG-1, we’d watch Stargate Atlantis, but that’s a good 60 hours worth of TV, so that’s not gonna happen anytime soon.

Bonus Minoan lesson for older kids: read the original writings of Atlantis

Plato, the Greek Philosopher first wrote about Atlantis, and that would make a great internet search for older kids to look into.  Start at the Wikipedia page for Atlantis, and go from there.

Go to Memory Verse puzzles to download 10 memory verse puzzles to work on with your kids. Pick up your copy of iBlog, a 400 page resource on growing your blog.

The post Hands on Minoan lesson plans appeared first on Adventures in Mommydom.