Tips for Teaching Mythology

At some point in their career, all educators, especially those that teach grades 5th through 7th, will have to deal with teaching mythology.  However, capturing the attention of young minds and helping them to learn about such a foreign subject can be quite hard.  Many educators have difficulty teaching mythology to this age group because mythology can be a difficult subject to fully grasp.  This is why it is important to make teaching mythology fun so that learning it will also be fun. Teaching mythology needs to be more than just reading and watching boring films.  Of course, you will need to introduce which ever myth you want to teach, but it needs to go past that.  As with any subject, if it is not interesting, your students probably will not learn much. The following tips will help give you the tools to make learning about mythology interesting and fun:

• When teaching mythology, try introducing which ever Greek myth is planned for the day and then have your students write essays, acting as a jury or judge, so they can express their opinions on what myths are associated with the different gods.  For instance, ask your students to express their opinions on whether Mount Olympus should have mortals on it or not and why they think that.
• Another tip to consider when teaching mythology is to have your students create a game with what they are learning.  This will encourage your students to pay closer attention to what they are learning while giving them the opportunity to creatively express the things in mythology they have learned.  Allow them to build the game boards, an instruction book, and anything else they may need.  A great game suggestion is a board game where they have to correctly answer questions about mythology to win.
•  Another great tool to use when teaching mythology is to associate the words used in the subject with everyday language.  For instance, one day you could focus on the terms Atlas, as this was a mythical giant and a form of a map.  Another day you could focus on “Achilles Heel”.  You could even have your students build a dictionary of mythology terms.
• When teaching mythology to older students, it could be fun for them to build a newspaper from what the information they are be taught.  Have them interview each other, create advertisements for each gods powers, etc….
• One last tool, which mostly deals with Greek gods, is to have your students build family trees for each of the gods they learn about. 

Teaching mythology can be difficult, especially if you are not sure how to reach your students.  The most important tip you can consider is to get your students involved as much as possible.  This could be through writing letters to gods or acting out different scenes from history.  The more involved your students are in the classroom, the more likely they will gain from your teaching mythology.