Orpheus and Eurydice in Ovid's Metamorphoses - Journeying to the Underworld

I created this lesson for my OCR GCSE 9-1 Classical Civilisation class. It’s dual coded throughout to reduce excess ‘noise’ to ensure students know what to focus on and when, in order to aid high quality knowledge retention.

The lesson is meant to complement the counterpart ‘Journeying to the Underworld’ GCSE lesson for the ancient Greeks: https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/homeric-hymn-to-demeter-journeying-to-the-underworld-in-ancient-greece-12655537

The lesson starts by introducing Ovid and Roman beliefs about the Underworld. Background is then given to students on who Orpheus is and why he is so famous in classical myth. Students are encouraged to summarise his importance themselves before moving on to a reading task.

The exam-specified version of Metamorphoses by Ovid is included as a hidden slide to be printed out for pupils, who will go through it as a class and pick out words they might struggle with to aid literacy-building and to ensure the text is accessible to all.

Students are then instructed to read through it again themselves and pick out key parts and summarise each part themselves (can be verbal, written or drawn). before attempting some exam questions so you can gain some clarity on where they are in terms of how much they have retained from the lesson.

The lesson finishes with a really good 5 minute video that summarises the story for pupils.

A final storyboard task is included should you want to extend the lesson beyond the one hour mark, or to be set as an engaging homework that helps make their learning stick.

Each slide has a pale yellow overlay to aid students with dyslexia / Irlen’s but this can be removed easily by deleting it, or its colour can be easily changed to suit your pupils’ needs.

Thanks for looking :)