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Home > Reconstructionism > Greek/Hellenic > Religious Education Curriculum Search

A Religious Education Curriculum Outline
for Hellenic Classical Homeschoolers and Afterschoolers

by Drew Campbell

 

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Learning Stage with Reference to the Classical Trivium Main Focus Area Ritual Skills to Be Mastered by End of Stage Suggested Materials/Activities
       

Early Childhood/Nursery School
/Kindergarten

Family Worship, Prayer Participates in bedtime prayers, grace and Hestia offering at meals; observes family devotions and altar-tending

The Aesop for Children or other illustrated edition of Aesop's Fables; mythology picture books (e.g., Aliki's Gods and Goddesses of Olympus)

Grammar Stage: Grades 1-4 Mythology, Basic Ethics Able to attend family and small group worship; knows basic ritual etiquette, names and attributes of gods, main festivals; uses standard Hellenic prayer forms (spontaneous or set)

All grades in this stage: mythology retellings (consider some of the more advanced ones, like Hawthorne's Wonder-Book or Tanglewood Tales as read-alouds); ancient Greek tales (e.g., relevant chapters from Fifty Famous Stires Retold or Ten Boys Who Lived on the Road), Growing Up in Ancient Greece, memory work using Greek material (names of gods and heroes, the Athenian months and festivals, Greek cities, famous battles, letters of the Greek alphabet...); copywork/penmanship practice with famous quotations from Greek literature (including specifically religious material such as the Delphic Maxims and Solon's Ten Precepts)

Grades 1-2: Aesop as read-along/-alone text

Grades 3-4: Children's Homer, D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths, Spend the Day in Ancient Greece or other activity books, John Malam's Gods and Goddesses, Eyewitness Books Ancient Greece

Logic Stage: Grades 5-8 History Overview and Highlights of Greek Culture Able to assist in family and small group worship; understands the structure of worship and reasons for various elements of it; can articulate basic religious concepts (e.g., polytheism, Reconstructionism, eusebeia, xenia)

All grades in this stage: biographies of famous ancients (e.g., Archimedes and the Door to Science, Ancient Greeks: Creating the Classical Tradition, children's edition of Plutarch's Lives); history overview (e.g., Oxford First Ancient History); Logic exercises

Unit study on the Olympics in whatever year they fall during this stage

Grade 5: Homeric Hymns
Grade 6: Hesiod's Theogony, Works & Days
Grade 7: Iliad
Grade 8: Odyssey

Rhetoric/Dialectic Stage: Grades 9-12 History, Drama, Philosophy Able to lead family and small group worship; familiar with specialized religious vocabulary and usage within Hellenic Recon community; can defend own beliefs and practices with reference to ancient sources

All grades in this stage: Plutarch's Parallel Lives (unabridged); Logic program (e.g., Traditional Logic 1 & 2)

Grade 9: Historians (Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon)
Grade 10: Dramatists (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes) and Lyric Poets (Sappho, Pindar, etc.); Aristotle's Poetics
Grade 11: Philosophers (Pre-Socratics through Plato); Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics
Grade 12: Philosophers (Aristotle, Plotinus "On Beauty," Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, selections from Plutarch's Moralia, Julian); Aristotle's Rhetoric

       

Notes

For more information on the Trivium, see Dorothy Sayers's essay "The Lost Tools of Learning." The most popular homeschooling guides that use the Trivium are The Well-Trained Mind (mostly secular), Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum (Roman Catholic), and Teaching the Trivium (Evangelical Protestant). Other literature-based homeschooling approaches, such as the Charlotte Mason method, are compatible with the Trivium.

Many of the books listed here would already be part of a classical curriculum, but would usually fall under humane letters (history and literature), not religious education. (For most classical homeschoolers, religious education will consist of Bible or catechism study). This outline has been created by adapting existing literature and history book lists to the needs of Hellenic Reconstructionists.

By the end of the Logic Stage, the student should have completed work that is equivalent to, and in some areas exceeds, the requirements for Hellenion's Basic Adult Education program.

If the student is doing a Great Books program or a four-year trivium history rotation (cf. The Well-Trained Mind), most of the books in the Rhetoric Stage would normally be covered in a single year devoted to "ancients" (often 9th grade). The next three years can then be spent on slower, more in-depth readings of selected texts, or on areas of special interest to the student.

For ideas on integrating home-based religious education into your family's life, see my Hellenic Home Life page.


This article originally appeared on Andrew Campbell's Nomos Arkhaios site which is currently on hiatus.
This article is copyright © 2000-2003 by Andrew Campbell and is reprinted here with permission.


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