Mythology & Spanish

[mom24girls]

Hi,
I am wanting to teach my girls mythology next year and am in need of a recommendation of a good book to use. Can anyone help me out with this?

I am also looking into starting them in a foreign language. I am leaning toward Spanish for this. I am leaning toward using Power Glide. Can anyone give me pros and cons on this curriculum?

By the way, my girls will be in 6th grade for these classes.

Thanks
Nancy

[momo3boys]

I've heard that power glide is great to teach them to understand spanish but not so good at the speaking. Easy Spanish (El espanol facil) is great for speaking, and if you school them together they can speak it to eachother and understand more. Easy Spanish is also great for older children and is oraganized for overlap. It is very personlized and the boys like it a lot. I teach it in my homeschool group and it works really well there. I recomend learning it in a group.

[Redhead]

I'm afraid that I don't know anything about Spanish, so I'll let others advise you there; but I minored in Classics and taught mythology for 5 years, so I might be able to help you in that area.

If you want something online, you can get at least some of Bullfinch's Mythology here: http://www.mythome.org/bullfinc.htm. If you don't mind the extra effort for yourself, however, I'd actually recommend doing it the way I did it. Get a good mythology text (I used the one I had from my college courses--- Classical Mythology by Morford and Lenardon) and tell the stories to your kids.

Actually, here's how I formally did it. I'd tell them the information in bits (e.g. we'd talk about the story of Athena's birth from Zeus' head), then I'd outline the information for them in notes which the students would take and have to reference for tests [you may not need to do this if you're not testing your kids]. Here's how the outline might look:

I. Unusual Births
A. Athena
1. Swallowed by Zeus as an infant
2. Grew inside him
3. Stabbed his brain with spear, causing a headache
4. Sprang from his head when Hephaestus broke it open
5. Symbolized her role as goddess of wisdom
B. Dionysus
1. Story outline would follow similar to the way it did above

Anyway, I taught mythology typically in cycles ranging in 3 to 9 weeks. The stories began as oral traditions, and I always found that they work best even today as such.

With mythology you must take care, though. Modern rewrites of the stories distort the originals significantly. That's why I recommend finding a college level text for yourself so that you'll have an idea of what's accurate and what's junk.

Hope this helps you some. I love mythology, and it's such a fun and interesting way to introduce Greek/Roman/Egyptian/Norse cultures and history.