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If your students are very young, or if time is lacking, it will be sufficient for this lesson to have shown the students that the alphabet was developing into the alphabet they know.

These Greek letters are essentially identical to the letters we use today.

Show the children the letters A, B, E, I, K, M, N, O, S, and T.Nevertheless, there are many letters in the ancient Greek alphabet that you and your students will immediately recognize. The Greek alphabet is about 2,700 years old. At this point you could show the students the Greek alphabet.Ask the children: What would the Greeks think when they saw the Phoenician ship returning to Athens, a few weeks later, all loaded up with the stuff the Phoenicians had asked for in their letter? Do you think they would want to learn to write? You could tell them that the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet so that they could start writing down all the things that were important to them. Begin the lesson on the Greek Alphabet by asking the students if they still remember the Phoenician traders who were trading purple cloth for olive oil at Athens.

The alphabet was a very important part of Greek culture! They wrote speeches, books about science and learning, plays, poems, and long histories of the things that happened to them. They pioneered many of the kinds of writing we consider standard today. Once the Greeks had an alphabet, it seems they could not stop writing. The reason we know about democracy in ancient Greece, or about the Olympic games, is that the ancient Greeks wrote all about them. The ancient Greeks also had a lot of other ideas and customs that are important for us: the Olympic games, for instance, began in ancient Greece. But the Greeks passed through many different forms of government in their cities, and eventually the people at Athens invented democracy, which is rule by the people instead of by kings or nobles. But they were also unlike the Phoenicians in some ways, and in particular they had different forms of government. Like the Phoenicians, the ancient Greeks lived in cities all over their rocky peninsula, and they also engaged in a lot of trade.