The Adventure

The main component of either full or half-day sessions is a role-played adventure story. The children must use their imagination, as well as their listening, speaking, co-operating and decision-making skills. It is very motivational, for boys and girls alike.

Captain Eynos (who believes it is currently 1602) sailed on a cruise with Sir Walter Raleigh in 1595 to try to find 'El Dorado'. I begin telling the story of that adventure, but soon decide there are enough children to crew a ship, and from then on the session turns into an imagined, role-played journey where the children are the adventurers hacking their way through the forests of Guiana chasing after Spanish gold. As the the story causes the party to split up, individuals and groups of children end up with quite different stories to tell.

Written Stories

If I do a half-day session with a class, then the children are left with their own exciting stories to record after my session, involving possibly several well motivated written literacy lessons.

If I am working with a class for the whole day, then in the afternoon the children begin working on their stories, and this gives me the chance to visit them a group at a time to talk with them, answer their questions (perhaps aboput parts of the story), and perhaps play a game of dice or cards with them, or look at a map of London, or count money, or demonstrate my sword and musket, etc. This ups the level of interaction with individual children, as well as being simply fun for them.

Option: Question and Answer

To finish, I sometimes have a "Q&A" style discussion, perhaps 45 minutes in length for a full day session, perhaps 20 minutes for a half day session. Whether your children have already been studying the Tudors or have only just started, they can ask questions about whatever they want (food, drink, houses, places, Queen Elizabeth, sailing ships, the Armada, famous people, soldiers, London, law and order, etc), and Captain Eynos can tell them all other little tales.