A Pirate Map or two... Finding Fun

Maps seem to be a bit of a theme here at the moment! I'll be showing your next set of requests from my embroidered map soon - probably on Thursday, as tomorrow is a holiday for us here in France.

Over at Mess, Muddle and Fun, Carolyn is encouraging bloggers to find some fun, inspired in part by the excellent GBS quotation: “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing”.

Carolyn's first week of suggestions is related to going for a walk, but the weather here (just like the weather in the UK) is not encouraging outdoor activities today. So instead of making a map of our favourite walk on the local Coulée Verte, I found myself captivated by making pirate maps again!

This first one was done in a lesson this morning - I teach a little five year old who is most reluctant to write, and I hoped that if she and I made a pirate map each, she'd feel inspired to write on hers! I pointed out that pirates never went to school and really couldn't write, so that her spelling was obviously going to be better than theirs! The plan worked, more or less, and it really reminded me that 'finding fun' is going to be the way to get through to this particular little girl.

But working with a five year old was both distracting and limiting - I asked her for name ideas on my own map and we ended up with a lot of 'Pirate's Bay', 'Pirate's Village' etc. I really didn't want to be the one to introduce the idea of cannibals to her, so we stuck with the Pirates, but I wanted some more creativity so this afternoon Son 1 and I were both to be found over the kitchen sink, burning the edges of more pieces of paper...

This time I drew a frankly dull outline, but I wanted to add a bit more of myself to the map. I remembered the stack and natural arch at Dawlish, Devon, and added that to the headland on the map. I couloured the headland green and it struck me that this was no desert island - this was somewhere off the coast of Britain.

So on went a beacon! Armada, Napoleon, celebrations, Lord of the Rings... I'm not sure which ones inspired this.

Got to have some archaeology - preferably with a bit of mythology to go with it!

And a long barrow inspired by the ones in Brittany, rather than in Britian itself.

Here's just a bit more archaeology - I had to get a bit of Scottish history and legend in there too.

Son 1 (they have a mini-holiday today, to join on to the Bank Holiday tomorrow) was busy with his own piece of 'ancient parchment'.

No maps for him - he's writing with lemon juice! I don't know what, yet...
So thanks for the fun, Carolyn!