teaching ancient history – primary grades

I agree, Rebecca. I hesitate to teach younger children mythology. It seems ridiculous to fill their minds with all the details about false gods when we should be filling their minds with all the details about the True God! It seems wise to take the same approach as the Old Testament. We are informed that the heathen countries worshiped false gods, given a detail or two when needed to reinforce a point, and told what they named their false gods.

When we do talk about that detail or two, I like to point my children to Romans 1: how they refused to worship the Creator and chose to worship the creatures instead. We talk about how those ancient cultures created their false gods in their own sinful likeness. And I really like the first paragraphs in the Introduction of Famous Men of Greece (from Greenleaf Press). It encourages the children to listen carefully to those stories about Greek heroes and legends and to discern what could have really happened and what is myth.

I skip the mythology stories at the beginning of the book and start in at Hercules. Of course, those hero tales still include some interaction with the Greek gods, but we don’t do a study of the Greek gods in detail.

A lot of it depends on your attitude toward those Greek gods too. If we present them as something exciting and fun, we do our children a dis-service and insult the True God. If, however, we present them as representative of the sinful hearts of people who turn their backs on God, our children will pick up on that attitude and it will reinforce what Scripture says.

And the KEY: Make sure you are getting as much, or more, Scripture in your children’s heads and hearts as you are any stories that involve false gods!