Summer SAVY, Session 3 Day 2, “Percy Jackson & Greek Mythology” (3rd-4th)
Day two was a great opportunity to really dive deep and focus on the big three gods and Perseus! We started our day by looking at images of the 12 Olympians with their symbols and using that information to figure out which God was being portrayed in the picture. This was a great refresher of what we learned yesterday and got our brains going and ready for the day ahead of us!
We dove right into our study of the big three and began with Hades, the god of the underworld. We read some stories of him from the original Greek myths and took some notes on chart paper to describe him and how he behaved. Next, we looked at the Percy Jackson book and how he is described in them as well as watching a scene from the Percy Jackson show on Disney and taking notes on this version of Hades. We were able to compare and contrast how he was portrayed in each depiction and why we think Rick Riordan made those changes to the character in the Percy Jackson series.
We repeated this same process with Zeus, Poseidon, and Perseus – each time reading and watching to compare the two depictions of the characters and think about why they were changed or remained the same in the Percy Jackson universe compared to the Greek myths. They did an amazing job working as teams to create posters for each god and digging deeper into these characters!
After lunch, we took our knowledge of the characters and applied it to our own writing. Students had to choose between Zeus, Hades, Poseidon, or Perseus and write a story where the myth version meets the Percy Jackson version. They had to figure out how and why they would be meeting and how the different versions would react. This is one of my favorite activities because students get so creative with how the similarities and differences impact the interactions that the versions have! They were able to share their stories with each other through a mix and mingle activity- ask them about it!
You can talk with them tonight about who their favorite of The Big Three is and ask them to explain why. You can also ask them about their story and how they chose to have the versions interact!