We Found the Lady's Pond!

I'm using this book club as a stealth means of teaching the kids history and geography. With this goal in mind, I decided to have the kids draw fantasy maps of where they think the lady's pond should be.

First I gave each child a map I had made to illustrate King Arthur's realms. I traced some maps of Great Britain, Ireland, and France together, and labeled them with the place names mentioned in the legends. For instance, "Brittany" was labeled as "Armorica," and I showed them the approximate locations of Gwynedd and Powys in Wales. (I say "approximate" because I put Powys a little too far south. My apologies to my Welsh friends, Lee and Felicity Waters!) I had great fun making the maps look antique by smearing them with my tea bags. I drink a lot of tea, so this task did not take long.

Once I had made my maps, I printed a copy of an antique map showing ships and sea monsters in the seas surrounding Wales. Mad props are due to the National Library of Wales, which had some great images I borrowed. You can explore the NLW's collections here: http://www.llgc.org.uk/. I encouraged the kids to follow the examples and create their own fantasy maps of the Lady of the Pond's realms.

In addition to sneaking some history and geography lessons into an art lesson, I am preparing these kids for their destinies as readers of fat fantasy novels with maps on the endpapers. Who knows, maybe some of the kids will get jobs as illustrators. You can say you saw their work here first: