Tag Archives: cultural literacy

This lesson plan on the Greco-Roman social is the eleventh–see below–or an eleven-lesson unit on the origins of religion and philosophy. I grabbed this from a social studies teacher with whom I worked for several years in Lower Manhattan. The raw documents, which I typed and formatted Microsoft Word, looked like they came from someplace on the Internet similar to Mark’s Text Terminal.

In any case, I attached this Cultural Literacy worksheet on Aesop’s fables as wells as this one on the idiom “When in Rome, Do as the Romans Do” as openers for this lesson, which can easily go for two or even three days. In order to get this activity started, you’re students will need this list of participants in the social and the student worksheet and organizer that will serve as their dance card, so to speak, in this activity. I’ll include this teacher’s copy of the list of participants in the Greco-Roman social as well. I regret that the page numbers given for the readings are for a long-forgotten textbook that my co-teacher and I used for this enterprise. It shouldn’t be hard to replace my page numbers with those from whatever textbook your district uses for globals studies and geography.

As I worked my way through posting this unit,  I realized I wanted these lessons to span two days so I could get a look at kids’ short-term memories, whether something they’d read the day before remained with them, and if they could apply that knowledge the next day. This guided my planning and suggested to me what I might do in the way of support for the students I served. Let me reiterate once more than these lessons are the basis for a series of lessons that I recut every year to fit the fashions of the New York State Global Studies and Geography Regents Examination.

In the final analysis, I see a lot of room for improvement in these lessons. You probably will too. Remember that just about everything you download from Mark’s Text Terminal is in Microsoft Word, so you may alter this material to your students’ and your own needs.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.