Zero to Hero

We arrived back at school and found a mysterious letter had been left in our classroom...

Zero to Hero Adventure Song - 

Our song this half term is "I Need a Hero". You may recognise the song from Shrek 2! It might also give you a clue as to who may have sent us the letter if you listen carefully to the lyrics... 

We came back from the holidays to find that a letter had been left for us! We were asked to show that we could work together as a team and whether we could be trusted. To prove this we went on a hunt around the school to find clues.

 That’s when we found another letter! It was Hercules asking for our help. We had to help to get him from a Zero to a Hero by learning lots about Ancient Greece so that he could be with his father Zeus. He gave us a passport that we had to stamp off.

 We wrote a letter back to Hercules to say that we would of course like to help him on his quest. We also took this chance to ask him questions about how he found out he was a Demi-God.

 Our first challenge was to learn all about the timeline of Ancient. We worked in our groups to put the timeline in the correct order.

 We then used a map to find all the important places in Ancient Greece that we might hear about whilst on our adventure.

 We then met the Goddess Athena, she told us all about the story how Athens was named after her. We acted this out as a play for her.

 She really enjoyed our play so she took us back in time on a tour of Athens. When we arrived, Athens looked a little different to what we’re used to seeing as it was all new! We wrote about it in a setting description.

We noticed that Medusa had a picture of a woman with snakes in her hair on her shield. She told us that this woman was named Medusa and told us the story of how she got there. We made a comic strip about the story.

 Inspired by the mythical monster of Medusa, we decided to create our very own! We looked at lots of mythical Greek monsters for inspiration. We then made our own on our Build-a-Monster workshop.

 We then filled our monsters with adjectives and used these to create some character descriptions.

We then learnt about the Greek author Homer who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. These famous stories included the tale of The Trojan Horse! Inspired by this, we wanted to create our very own so we put a step by step design together.

 Miss Martin then told us she’d found a mysterious letter. It was from Odysseus! He demanded that we go to war with the Trojans. Odysseus then came to see us. We grabbed our swords and shields and had to hide inside the horse. We then screamed, “For Greece!” as we surprised the Trojans. Thankfully we won the war so were then able to write a diary about our crazy day.

We then used our design to create a minute version of the Trojan horse that we hid in. We used saws to cut the wood and Mr Cockcroft helped us to attach the wheels where we used a hammer. We then decorated the horses with lollypop sticks.

We wrote up an honest evaluation of our Trojan horse.

After meeting Athena, we wanted to learn more about the Greek Gods. So we created our very own top trump cards!

 We quickly realised that the Gods were very unfair when punishing people and had some really harsh punishments! We compared these with the punishments that the Christian God would use. We learnt about what Christian’s believe is fair and just and compared these with what the Greek Gods believed.

In art, we thought about how we could show how people are feeling just by a picture. We had a try at making different facial expressions and thought about what our eyes, eyebrows and mouths looked like.

We then had a practice at drawing three different facial expressions. Again, thinking about what the eyes, eyebrows and mouth looked like to show feeling.

We then used what we learnt to draw our very own Greek God.

Next, we learnt about what life was like for an ancient Athenian. The Greeks lived very differently to the way we do now and treated slaves and women unfairly. We worked as a group to sort the negatives and the positives of being a slave an a woman in Athens. We had a debate about which we would rather be and why.

We then found out that the Athenians used to attend the Olympics! We compared the ancient Greek Olympics to the modern day Olympics we know today.  

We then created our very own Olympic vase by drawing in the same style and using the iconic orange and black colours.

We also played and Olympic board game to test our ancient Olympic knowledge.

We met a famous ancient Greek mathematician. His name was Archimedes. We discovered that water pours out when you put something in it. We wanted to prove this so we carried out an investigation. We started by making a plan of how we would carry out our investigation and a prediction of what would happen.

Then we did the investigation and recorded our results. We used what we had discovered to then make another prediction.

We collected our results and put these onto a line graph to make the data more accessible.

We then imagined we were scientists so had to write what we had found in a scientific report.

 Archimedes then taught us the different  Greek symbols for their numbers and letters! We had great fun cracking the codes and learning to write our own names.

To finish our time in Athens, we learnt about how they influenced how we deal with democracy today! Although we did find out that things had changed a lot since their original ideas. We were given character cards – slaves, women, Athenian Men, men not from Athens etc. We then split ourselves to see how many people could actually vote. It turned out there still wasn’t a great democracy but at least It was a start.

 We then compared Greek democracy with democracy in the UK today.