Can you eat the Parthenon?

At our house we did! I have been striving to "re-claim" why I decided to home school, so there have been a few extra projects around here.

The best part is that they have all been completed with things that we already have around the house!

We have been learning about ancient Greece. In particular we learned about the Greek wars and then the invasion from Persia, and where we get our word "marathon"from. Today we specifically looked at one of the great wonders of the ancient world- the Parthenon.


We read about it, looked at pictures, and discussed the ruins that stand today.


We then wrote about it and thought it would be fun to make a model of our own Parthenon...one we could eat! We made gingerbread dough, talked about the columns and carved a design out of the dough. We didn't attempt to carve the design on top of the intricate detail of people as they did out of stone.

So, while our little Parthenon was cooking we talked about what it would be like to carve all of those details out of stone. We had our own hand at trying carving. We used soap and the kids went to work.

They talked about how hard this would be! As they carved we also read some of Aesop's fables.
We talked about how Aesop was a slave to a Greek long ago and that his stories have lasted and have been passed on for thousands of years.

Then, because it took much longer to cook than expected, we wrote our own version of the lion and the mouse and tried to replace the two animals with our own. We decided that a lion and mouse worked much better for main characters :)




Our finished product! Nothing fancy, but it was good to eat :)

Oh yeah, we also talked about why the Parthenon should be capitalized! :)