(In spite of what I said last week!)

This morning at KinderClassics, we were talking about resources, and because I seemed to have come across a number of the Latin courses, the teacher asked if I knew of any Ancient Greek resources for little ones. I told him there were and promised to email him the information.

I found it ended up rather longer than I expected! Then I figured that I’d post it here for my own (possible) future reference.

I’m just at the stage of noting these… and I haven’t seen any of them up close.

I’ve tried to link directly to the source… but most of these are also available through Amazon.

There are a number of different forms of Ancient Greek. The main ‘camps’ are Koine (biblical) and Attic (used by playwrights and philosophers). Koine is generally seen as significantly easier than Attic, although apparently it’s much easier learning Attic once you know Koine. For little ones, the only options are Koine. From reading the Latin Centered list, it sounds as though there might be some sales to be made if anyone came up with a children’s Attic course:-)

Elementary Greek (from Open Texture) is a three year course, aimed at eight or nine year olds. It comes with textbook, audio assist, work book and flash cards. It’s a fairly new course (I hadn’t realised they’d actually finished the sequence), but generally, the Latin Centered (LCE) folk who have tried it seem to like it. I believe it’s a parts-to-whole approach.

From Trivium Pursuit comes A Greek Alphabetarion and A Greek Hupogrammon (they also have an alphabet banner). I believe that these are just an intro to the alphabet, and a copybook for writing practice. They do have Homeschool Greek Volume One and Homeschool Greek Volume Two (which are aimed at the late primary/early secondary age group) and Little Bitty Baby Learns Greek (which is also an introduction to the alphabet). I haven’t heard anything about these, aside from the alphabetarion, which generally seems to be fine, but obviously is limited:-)

I’d forgotten Hey Andrew, Teach Me Some Greek which has been around for a while. Some seem to really love this and others not so much. It’s apparently quite slow, and the books are more expensive than some of the other options. Unless starting with very young children, there seems to be a recommendation to begin with level 2. (There’s an overview here). It is apparently a whole-to-parts approach like Minimus.

And I’ve just seen -coming this year- Greek for Children. I know nothing about it, but I know a lot of people like their Latin for Children.

At this point, you have a choice, depending on why you’re doing Greek.

If you want to continue with Koine (to read the New Testament) you go to Machen’s New Testament Greek for Beginners or Mounce’s Basics of Biblical Greek.

Or, if you wish to change to Attic, there is Athenaze, Introduction to Attic Greek by Mastronarde, Crosby and Schaeffer’s Introduction to Greek (no-frills, and no answer key), John Williams White’s First Greek Book (free download from I believe this is also pretty basic) or Cambridge’s Reading Greek.

Homer of course, wrote in Homeric which is different again (although similar to Attic, I believe). So there’s also a Reading Course in Homeric Greek.

Some Aesop’s fables in Greek, as well as Latin and English.

And after you’ve done all this, you might just be able to read Harry Potter!

I guess I should do the same thing for Latin—maybe another day:-)