Ancient Greece is full of exciting stories and bold history, offering endless opportunities to create fun and meaningful lessons for your ESL learners. One fascinating figure from Greek mythology is Athena, the goddess of wisdom, courage, and strategic warfare. Teaching about Athena allows students to explore rich cultural stories while practicing vocabulary, reading comprehension, and speaking skills in English. By using myths as a learning stimulus, you can spark curiosity, imagination, and discussion in your classroom, all while reinforcing language development.
Older primary-aged students, in particular, can benefit from exploring Athena’s myths through storytelling, role-play, and creative activities. Lessons can include reading comprehension tasks about her origin and adventures, vocabulary exercises focused on myth-related terms, and even art-based projects where students draw Athena or create symbols representing her wisdom and bravery. These activities make language learning dynamic, interactive, and memorable.
2. Role Play
Once you
have got to know the myth of Zeus’ favourite daughter, Athena, you could engage
your students with a wealth of role-play opportunities. Conscience alley is a
popular activity. Get your children to make two lines facing one another.
Choose one person to act as Athena – providing some sort of Ancient Greek robe
and a headdress can bring the character to life. As Athena walks down the
‘alley’ created with the classmates, she should ask the same question to each
person, such as Did I do the right thing? relating to a part of the
story on which you are focusing. This encourages the use of justifying the
answers they give and is a great way to develop spoken English skills.
3. Athena is/has/can
Being able to use a variety of verbs in English is imperative to continued success in the language. The verbs ‘to be’, ‘to have’ and ‘to be able to’ are essential ones and, using the Greek myth of Athena, your students can practise their use easily. One worksheet contained in this pack encourages children to use their knowledge of Athena to write about what she is, has and can do. This activity could be done independently with each child writing their own. Alternatively, in pairs or small groups, important discussions can be had with one person scribing the answers on behalf of the group. Of course, encourage your students to use English throughout the entire conversation to stretch them further.
4. Retelling the story
Understanding
and being able to recall the key events in any story you are reading is an
essential skill. For students learning about Greek mythology, retelling the
story of Athena using their own words and sentence structure can be a fun
activity. You could use the worksheets contained within this pack to do so.
Alternatively, you could get your students to use their creative skills and
make puppets to retell the story verbally. If you take photos of each section
of the story, you could print and use them as the images for a comic strip.
Some students will need help scaffolding the myth, so you could give them the
sentence starters or word mats with the vocabulary they are most likely to use.
Others will be more advanced with their English acquisition and may need little
or no support.
5.
Our FREE Ancient Greek Mythology - Athena product includes a wealth of resources
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