Weeks Two and Three: Stories from Egypt and Greece through the Middle Ages

It’s been such a busy two weeks at camp, we’ve not had time to post our adventures. Last week, we travelled back in time to Egypt and Greece. We talked about the ways of life and the stories that informed those time periods. Children are naturally drawn to the fantastic scope of myths and are incredible for their ability to recall, with significant detail, stories that most of us have read repeatedly yet can recall only the vague outline of. Probably the highilight of the week was when a group of children convinced us that they could work cooperatively on a charade if we left the room. When we came back in, we realized the characters they were acting were not (mercifully) Elsa or Pokemon but Medusa, Persueus, Athena, Pegasus and the Graeae. We also made Senet game boards, beads and trading cards of Greek Gods. Elementary travelled to the Egyptology rooms at the ROM where they did a discovery walk and spent nearly an hour admiring the dioramas.

This week, we studied fairy tales and early drama. The casa children were busy working on their fairy tales (using our handy fairy tale device dice) which they shared with us at the closing circle. They also made canvas shields with their own heraldry designs and collected foliage for a sand labyrinth decorated with flowers, pine cones, grasses and even corn husks which we built outside on the last (and hottest) day. In elementary, much of the week’s planning had to give way to a new-found passion for paper dolls and puppet theatres. In true Montessori fashion, we followed the child but also made sure we did some drama practice in preparation for a wonderful workshop provided by Shakespeare in Schools on Thursday in which the children told the story of Macbeth in tableaux. Here are the results. Next week: on to The Age of Invention!

Macbeth Tableaux

Today we remember Ursula Franklin: “Peace is not the absence of war but the absence of fear.”