Mythological Monster Project

Description

The following project is one of my students’ absolute favorites in which a student will research a monster from Greek mythology (comes with a premade list) of your or their choosing and present their findings to the class. The task as presented as creating a Monster Fighting Guide for Greek heroes and works well in a unit on heroes. In addition to thorough directions on the project requirements, you’ll get examples of projects, linked resources for you and your students to get started on research, and a grading rubric.

Recommendations

Age: 

I do this with 9th and 10th graders, but it is suited to students middle school and up. 

Unit Timing: 

I do this project in the first term of Latin 2, between reading the Perseus story and starting the Hercules stories in the Fabulae Graecae. I also usually end up timing it so that we do this project right before Halloween. 

Planning:

Depending on your students you can let them choose or assign them a monster. It’s usually fine to double up but you don’t want 10 students in your class all doing the hydra so use your best judgment in how you want to assign the monsters. 

I typically give two hours of class time to do research. This project contains some resources to help your students get started. You should allot at least one hour of time for presentations per 10 students (e.g. if you have 20 students, plan to use two hours of class time).

Other Notes:

It happened organically the first time I did this project when I had four sections of Latin 2, but if you have multiple sections of the same prep you can use the project as a catalyst for students picking a class mascot for an inter-class competition.

As you can probably guess many students will want to do monsters you’ve already studied or monsters they heard about reading Percy Jackson. Some of these monsters can be great, but some just don’t have a ton of resources on them, so watch out for that.