It's Friday! So, today we began our unit on Ancient GREECE! Our big Essential Questions for today were: "What are the differences and similarities between Athens & Sparta?" and "What caused Athens & Sparta to become so different from each other, if they are neighbors?"
To start, we watched the movie trailer for "300" and discussed what it was about (Sparta vs. Persia) and also talked about the "realistic-ness" of the movie. After this, we did our Venn Diagram on the board (below)...
After this, we watched another short clip (click here to watch) which is a commercial that Greece has made for Americans to "entice" us to go visit Greece. See if you notice what kind of geography Greece has. Does this have anything to do with creating a big difference between Sparta + Athens? Notice many rugged mountains, deep valleys, ocean, islands, etc. These factors all made it very difficult to get from Athens to Sparta, so they ended up growing very different.
