At the end of last year, my Classics Department decided to forge our own path for Year 9. We’d decided to stretch Cambridge Latin Course 1 over Year 7 and Year 8 to make the most of the stories, grammar, and civilisation topics (we’ll be moving onto the Fifth Edition in September with much excitement). Doing CLC 2 in just Year 9 before moving onto Latin to GCSE (John Taylor) didn’t quite seem to work with our students’ growing interest in classical mythology.
So we decided to make our own ‘Heroes and Heroines’ curriculum, which would cover similar grammatical features to CLC 2, but be based on the stories of Hercules, Perseus, Atalanta, Circe, and Odysseus (in that order). We had a little bit of material to start with - some stories from John Taylor and Dunlop, some civilisation material from the OCR CC GCSE Myth and Religion component, and our adapted version of North London Collegiate’s ‘The Baleful Head’ (thanks to NLCS for this superb resource). We also added some Greek work - students learned the Greek alphabet, transliteration, and some basic Greek nouns.
I also asked AI to help; by prompting it to write me a simple Latin story of 100 words based on the Eduqas GCSE Latin vocabulary list, it gave me a foundation which I could correct and adapt to make it accurate, Year 9-level Latin. When I had written the stories, I was then able to put the story back in to AI, and it would generate an alphabetised vocabulary list which saved me quite a bit of time.
The lessons blended Latin, Greek and Classical Civilisation, and it was good to cover some reception work too, looking at Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Medusa’, the 2016 presidential election image of Donald Trump as a Perseus holding the head of Hilary Clinton, and an image from the front of GQ magazine of Rihanna as Medusa. Students were great at unpacking the 21st-century messaging of these images - Mary Beard’s ‘Women and Power’ book proved useful for this too.
This holiday, I’ve been working on the Odysseus component. I’ve used the John Taylor Latin to GCSE 1 story of Odysseus and the Trojan Horse, a clip from the 2004 ‘Troy’ film, Greek Myth Comix’s depiction of Odyssey Book 9, Eleanor Antin’s photograph of the Judgment of Paris, and my own retelling of the Cyclops story. I’m looking forward to seeing what students make of this.
If you’d like to see any of the resources, please do send me a message. We’re still in the first year of the course, and I’ll be adjusting things for next year - we perhaps spent a little too long on Perseus at the expense of Penelope, but it’s been great for enthusing students with the ancient world and its myths.
Medusa: Black-Figure Vase, British Museum.