Greek Mythology (2)

I spent some time debating how much detail we wanted to go into Greek mythology at this point in time... I didn't feel the girls would enjoy the violence aspect of the adventures at their current age... And Ancient Greek culture is a good topic base for Art, Geography and History lessons, so I'd rather have the time to plan a unit in enough detail to do it justice rather than do a rushed job now. 😶

With that in mind, I decided to use this week just to focus on the myths we've already covered in the form of another shadow puppet theatre (subtly revising work on light and shadows at the same time!).

The girls chose to do the story of King Midas and the Golden Touch.

Before they could do their play, first I had them rewrite the story in their own words in script format. This sounds a bit daunting for a 6 year old but MashaAllah they managed with some structured help!

After rereading the version in the book and comparing it with a version online (ideally we would go to the library but unfortunately we're without a car atm!), I had the girls tell me what they thought were the main parts to the story. We wrote these on scrap paper so we could then rearrange them into chronological order when they were done (this also helped them see if they had missed any key events out when summarising the story).

I gave the girls a storyboard template so they could translate the bullet point version into a storyboard. This was also useful in getting them to think about what might be on stage at that point during their shadow play.

Next, I had them write out the text in their storyboards on a new piece of paper but adding more detail, paragraphs and direct speech so it flowed like a story - and made them think about what their narrator and characters might say during the play. I had them do this pretty much independently as I wanted them to come up with different versions - a good lesson in how even though we might have the same thing to start with (we all read the same stories), they wrote them again in different ways. Maybe this could be why many different versions of the same story exist? Considering how many thousands of years old the stories are and how many times they must have been retold and passed down!

When they were finished, we recapped editing skills (we had done work that week on conjunctions and fronted adverbials, so they were looking out for those in particular!) and they made changes in a different colour.

(They wrote the words "everything" and "excitedly" at the end as spelling practise since they had misspelt them in their writing. Just chose one for them to do.😗)

Finally, I challenged them to work together on the laptop to turn their stories into one playscript. They needed to think about the layout themselves and talk together to agree on which wording to use! I created them a file on Google Docs for this so I could help with editing on my new laptop (gift from my husband, MashaAllah 😁) - they were amazed how we could all edit the same file at the same time! But it was really convenient so I think from now on we'll continue using Google Docs over Microsoft Word, inshaAllah.

The above was done over three consecutive days.

For their shadow puppets, we talked about how they could show the things turning into gold - how could they make the shadows change colour? I prompted them to think about layering - as we had previously layered blue and yellow cellophane to create a green shadow for grass - which materials could they layer to turn an opaque shadow into yellow?

When they were done and had practised it a few times, we recorded the show (each scene as a separate clip) and edited it on the laptop using Shotcut into one long video.