Greek Mythology Fun

For the past few weeks, fourth graders have been reading and researching about gods and goddesses from Greek mythology. Not all of them were 100% excited until they started reading about their chosen god/goddess and making connections with how they were related to other students' gods. It was so funny to hear students telling others that they were their wife/husband or that they threw someone else in to the sea. They thought it was hilarious and it was really engaging, plus it helped the students makes connections in their learning.

As their main source of information, students used Britannica online. The table below is from Britannica. The students were able to look at this table, see a glimpse of what each god was all about, and choose one based on their own interest. A student interested in hunting would choose Artemis, while a student interested in music might choose Apollo.

After choosing who they wanted to research, they clicked on the orange hyperlink to go to that article. Another thing I love about Britannica is that it will read the article aloud. Some of my students wanted to read it, but others like to listen. This was especially nice for some of the students who had longer articles, as well as for some who needed help pronouncing some of the words. Who doesn't need help pronouncing some of those names!?

While reading or listening students were taking notes. We worked on breaking the articles down into paragraphs and determining the main idea and supporting details from each paragraph. This is what our notes looked like:

The next step was for students to use iClipArt to find pictures that matched their research. Each students goal was to find 8-10 pictures. After we found pictures, we put them into iMovie on our iPads and recorded our voices over the pictures. Then, we made a Keynote slide to use as a title page and we were finished.

I am so proud of how these movies turned out. All of the students were engaged, interested, and created an awesome final product to show their learning. We had a fun class period watching these to celebrate!