Joshua-Malachai/Ancient Greece must reads

Since you know your son and I don’t, I’m just going to throw out some suggestions. Something may work. =)

Try Our Little Spartan Cousin, Our Little Athenian Cousin, and Our Little Macedonian Cousin – each has about 8-10 chapters. There is also a guick read called Growing Up in Ancient Greece that would work. There is a Life in Ancient Greece coloring book from Dover that is another way to teach them about the way life was then. If he likes action stories, he would probably like the D’Aulaires book of Greek Myths, Mary Pope Osborn’s Greek Myths, or my personal favorite (also available as an audio book) A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales by Nathanial Hawthorne. 

Finding books that contain pictures of the real thing helps to make this come alive for children. The Usborne or DK books help with this. SCM also has the Ancient Greece: The Stuff They Left Behind packet available. I googled lots of things and came up with sooo much. It can be a fascintating study to see what they accomplished without modern tools – and how much their culture has influenced ours.

If he likes short biographical type stories and enjoys color pictures to go with the text, get the Memoria Press version of the Famous Men of Greece by Haaran. It is also avaiable as a free audio book from librivox.org. Sometimes I let my younger kids color while listening to the stories. It keeps their hands busy while they listen.

Alexander the Great by Jacob Abbott might be good since it is about the events surrounding one person. It is available as a paperback, an ebook, or an audio book (free).

There are YouTube videos on Acnient Greece. Some are from the National Geographic Society, History Channel, and others. Some use video game technology to show you how battles happened. I found them interesting (of course, we watched them after reading the chapter about it, but still…). There are clips about the 7 ancient wonders, Ancient Troy, the Battles of Thermopylae (300 Sparatan soldiers held off thousands of Persian soldiers for days), Marathon (although seriously outnumberd, the Athenian soldiers thoroughly defeated Perisan soldiers on the beach at Marathon), Alexander the Great and many others. Just be careful which ones you choose (some are less appropriate than others).