We met that John Lloyd Stephens, a famous American explorer. He'd built a time machine that can take us back to the Ancient Mayan Civilisation. It is a very mysterious time in history as nobody really knows what happened to the Mayans. By travelling back in time, We're hoping to find out some more about them.

Do you want to come with us to learn about them?

Our adventure began when we met John Lloyd Stephens, an American explorer.

He explained that he had a time machine that could take us back to the Ancient Mayan civilisation and asked us if we wanted to join him.  However, the time machine was in Central America so we had to work out how we would get there and how long it would take.

We learnt about time zones and how they would affect the time we arrived.

We also completed a Burn 2 Learn to find out the names and locations of countries in Central America.

During our first editing Lesson, we read a paragraph about Mayan headdresses.  We had to highlight and annotate all the good features before we designed our own.

We chose whether we were designing one for a priest, craftsman or warrior.

With our designs complete, it was time to create our headdresses.  It was quite a messy job!

Having completed our headdresses we evaluated them against the original criteria……

Then we discovered that our headdresses were magical and could transport us anywhere in the world.  We just had to write a story about this.

We thought about where we would like to go, drew it and then wrote sentences with relative clauses to describe it. 

After, we thought about all the problems that could occur whilst we were there.  We thought we could use speech to introduce a problem in our story. With all of our ideas in our head, it was time to write the story.

Having completed our headdresses, we evaluated them against the original criteria.

During our first editing lesson, we read a paragraph about Mayan headdresses.  We had to highlight and annotate all the good features.

In our second editing lesson we looked at a bad example (WABOLL) of a setting description and tried to improve it with our partner using what we knew about the Mayan rainforest.

Then, in reading, we read a text about the Hero Twins, who are two of the most significant characters in Mayan Mythology.

Then we learnt about the Mayan gods We completed a Burn 2 Learn comparing Mayan’s Belief about religion to ours. After, we filled in factfiles about some of the different gods and tried to draw them.

We decide it would be a good idea to design a leaflet to inform visitors to our museum all about the different gods.

First we had to check John Lloyd Stephen’s introduction: his typewriter was broken and missing out the punctuation!

Then we looked at a WAGOLL paragraph and highlighted the good features. 

We then wrote a paragraph about our chosen god.

When it was complete we used other people’s paragraphs to make one leaflet.