Europe Week: Welcome to England

Well it's the start of a new week so the Imaginators are about to explore a whole new continent! This time we're taking a trip across Europe and our first stop... well it's jolly old England of course! 
 
So to launch into our adventure we found England on our trusty map mural and spoke about what England is known for... at the top of the list coming from the Imaginators... the Queen! Some of the other answers I got were castles and old buildings.

The little Imaginators started off the morning in the studio but I knew they would be hearing the story of Madeline in London so we talked about all the places Madeline saw... there was Tower Bridge, Big Ben, Hyde Park and of course they rode on a double-decker bus and went to see the Queen! I figured this was a neat opportunity to tie in map skills! So we talked about what a map is and what it is used for... one of my little campers went to great pains to describe how you can use a map to find treasure! LOL. We also talked about the key or legend and how this helps us to understand what the map is showing. We used black lines to represent roads and a blue line for the River Thames!

Of course these are artistic maps ;P so they are not to scale and places do not resemble their actual locations :) 

For my older campers our art took a very different turn! I happen to be a really big Shakespeare fan so I don't think you can talk about England and not mention Shakespeare, arguably the greatest playwright of all time. So I was thrilled that their story was inspired by this famous bard and for our art project we made the characters and props to put on our very own pallet stick theater... London style! You will see the fruits of their labour later in the week but for now... 
 
Take a look as they create their characters and decorate their stage curtains :) On Wednesday they'll hang their curtains on their little cardboard stages and we'll have a little show! 

Here's what they did at The Reading Garden.