Teaching Ancient Greece: Lesson Plans, Vase Animations, and Resources

Heroism, music, museums, poetry, drama, love, hunting, war, sacrifice… Pottery is a route into so many subjects. This accessible book offers ready-to-use lesson plans and resources for teaching about the ancient world, and for teaching a range of topics via antiquity. The materials use pottery as a resource for understanding ancient culture. Each lesson plan incorporates a particular vase and an animation made from that vase by the Panoply Vase Animation Project (www.panoply.org.uk): Sappho, Dionysus, Libation, Iris and Heracles. These resources can be used with learners of any age and any level of familiarity with ancient Greek culture. Created by experienced educators all over the world, each lesson plan contains an introduction, a lesson including one of the animations, and an exciting activity to extend the learning experience. In the development of this book, young people have been writing poetry and stories, acting, mapping, drawing and designing, recording music, and planning exhibitions – thinking about knowledge-sharing, budgets, and accessibility. From learning about pottery, through a wide range of topics, to making stop-motion animations, this is an action-packed set of resources to make learning enjoyable, challenging, and memorable.

Keywords: Ancient Greece, pedagogy, pottery, Greek vases, mythology, animation

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The lessons cover a wide range of activities and approaches that will appeal to different types of learners, there is plenty of in-built student autonomy and flexibility in modes of delivery. […] A highlight of the volume is the images – these are both instructive and joyful! […] Overall, this is a timely and well-judged volume that has the potential to make a notable contribution to the area of Classics teaching and outreach. […] the volume will have a ready and wide audience in primary- and second-level teachers, but also tertiary-level teachers of both Classics and education.
Bridget Martin, University College Dublin

The book edited by Sonya Nevin is an excellent work, of outstanding conception [which] includes a variety of objects and topics with many possible implications and connections in ancient and modern arts, culture, drama and religion history etc. […] The multicultural approach is perfect for a wide audience, worldwide, including different types of classes and levels of education. It also raises questions and encourages further studies regarding many different topics of great interest.
Martina Treu, IULM University in Milan