It's all Greek to me

It's been a rough year for education in our house.  Between house renovations, depression, Rick's psycho schedule, a couple family emergencies, and acclimating to a new state, homeschooling has taken a bit of a hit.  Most of my efforts have been focused on helping the older two Bushbrats wade through high school.  The younger girls have had to make do with workbooks, documentaries, and whatever bits and pieces they gleaned from lectures to their older siblings.  It stinks, because when I had a whole horde of primary age kids we had a blast.  We always had some project or educational adventure going on. As the kids have gotten older, though, it's gotten harder to schedule the fun when there's always some obligation or disparate academic need in the way.

This last week, though, my oldest three girls went to a youth camp with our church, and I seized the opportunity.  My girls have always loved themed-days, and since we were studying ancient Greece, the activities practically planned themselves.

On the first day we read Greek myths, decorated terracotta plates, did Greek-themed wordsearches and colored maps of the Mediterranean while watching documentaries.  The second day, we held our own Olympics.

*Aside: For those of you who are yourselves Grecophiles, you would be technically correct to point out that we couldn't have our own Olympics because we are all *ahem* female and THAT JUST ISN'T DONE.  However, my delightfully pedantic friends, I am pleased to inform you that while we called it the Olympics to keep things simple, we know it was more accurately a Heraia, the games in honor of Hera that were reserved specifically for unmarried girls, who would compete in loose one-armed chitons with their hair unbound.  As a married woman, I did not participate.  So there.*

In the interest of historical accuracy (and because my children are all firebugs) we naturally started with the lighting of the sacred flame, which would burn throughout the games.  Then, using what we could find around the house, we held our five events in the backyard.

First was the discus throw, made possible courtesy of a five-pound weight from Rick's workout bench.  The discus was followed by the shot put (weighted ball), javelin throw (Rick's walking stick), and wrestling (first person to step over the hose and out of the loop loses, best two out of three).  We ended with a footrace (three laps around the gazebo) and crowned our victors with laurels.

 

We ended the celebrations by wearing our finest bedsheet chitons to a feast from Zino's Greek Restaurant--gyros, spanakopita, baba ganoush, dolmades (stuffed grape leaves) and some baklava, with fresh grapes, cucumbers, and bowls of grape "wine".  As you can expect, my kids ate mostly grapes and the side of fries because they're terrible ingrates.  It didn't ruin the day, though, and now we know that none of us like baba ganoush because eggplants are the devil.

I'm really proud of these couple days.  This isn't what homeschooling always looks like.  There's often a lot more yelling and workbooks.   This, however, was a win that we all needed. It was a good day.