Teaching Inferences with Greek Mythology!

updated 1/23 Teaching inferences with Greek mythology is fun! I have several middle and high school students who love greek mythology. After a recent trip to Greece, they were so excited to discuss and see photos from my visit to the Parthenon in Athens. Since my trip, I’ve been obsessing about greek mythology activities since this content is highly motivating to some of my students. I’m excited to share some of them with you!

Why greek mythology?

Besides the motivational factor, it adds the necessary complexity and rigor that is needed for some of my highly-intelligent students who struggle with making inferences, understanding character traits and perspective-taking. Second, it a a great way to tie academic content into language, counseling and social skills activities.

I’ve been so geeked on everything Greek, I created a set of Boom cards based on the character traits of greek gods and goddesses. In this set, the student uses the character traits as their guide to choose how that specific god or goddess would solve modern problems. I’ve found that it helps with mental flexibility as students are used to solving problems based on socially-appropriate guidelines for behavior. This activity adds another level of complexity by having students use the character traits (some which are not so positive) to guide their answers. Hades, God of the Underworld, was impulsive and deceptive. His approach to solving problems would not meet today’s guidelines for “socially acceptable.” This activity forces students to completely take the perspective of a person/god/goddess AND understand the character trait. Looking for other ideas for perspective taking? Check out this blog post.

What do those traits mean?

How do people with those traits approach solutions to problems?

BOOM Cards: Making Inferences from Greek Mythology

Here’s the link for the Boom Cards: What Would Zeus Do? Using Character Traits to Solve Modern-day Problems

In this deck, students are shown a Greek god or goddess and their character traits. A modern-day problem is posed and students choose the best response based on how the god or goddess would solve it. So the student infers how the god or goddess would solve the problem based on their character traits! Look at you! Teaching inferences, character traits, problem solving and perspective taking with one activity! This is a great activity for students with subtle cognitive deficits or for general ed students.

On the following slide, students are shown the modern day depiction of the same problem and asked how they would solve it. This opens the door for them to also examine their own personal character traits.

Teaching inferences, greek mythology, character traits, perspective taking, speech therapy

Looking for other ideas on teaching inferences and character traits with Greek mythology? These are easy to implement:

Character Trait Shield: Have your students make a character trait shield for a favorite god or goddess. The shield can describe the “feelings,” (some of these may need to be inferred from text), “actions,” “speech” and “thoughts” of the god or goddess. This is a great opportunity for your students to combine their prior knowledge of the gods and goddesses AND make inferences from pictures of text.
Compare and Contrast: Use a Venn diagram to compare and contrast the character traits of the gods and goddesses. I like contrasting Ares, the god of war and Athena, the goddess of war. Ares was known for the violent aspects of war while Athena was knowledgeable in military strategy.
Modern-day Jobs: List the character or personality traits and then have students choose a modern-day job for the god/goddess from greek mythology. For example, Hephaestsus, the god of fire was the workman of the immortals, making their furnishings and weapons. His modern day job? Working for a tech industry giant, designing robots. I would guess he’s single (not really a people person)!!
My Greek Role Model: Have students pick a god or goddess that has character traits that they admire. See if the student can find 1-2 things they might have in common with this god or goddess!