You may have guessed by now that with our trip to England coming up, we are spending a lot of time on all things British. In preparation for seeing Magna Carta we dedicated a mom camp day to learning ALL about it.
I decided to use the Disney movie 
I freely admit the movie is in no way factual. But, that’s when I stepped in and started explaining how the movie was different from real life. King John was over taxing his barons. Of course, Magna Carta is about more than just being over taxed. He was also dictating who rich widows married and turning too much of England into forest land, among other things.
Next we printed out some adorable and free Robin Hood masks from Sparklebox and put on our own Magna Carta play. The masks include the main characters from the Robin Hood story, but we improvised and used some of them for the barons and widows and other characters. The Princess insisted on playing evil King John and Cinco played the barons. Given our love of William Marshal we included him in the play as one of the negociators of Magna Carta.
Shameless plug for my William Marshal book:
With a little more help from Disney, I took what was supposed to be a Bambi craft and used it to talk more about the forestry laws before Magna Carta. After all, you could be killed or imprisoned for poaching the King’s deer!
Moving on to more serious matters, we also completed a 4-page lesson from the British Council on Magna Carta.
And, this is Cinco, The Princess and me looking at one of the four original copies of The Magna Carta in Salisbury Cathedral. It is supposed to be the best preserved of the existing copies. i must agree it looked brand new! Lucky for us, we had the chance to actually hover over the document. Although it was written in Latin, we did find The Marshal’s name on the document. He’s listed in a prominent place at the head of the nobles and after the bishops and king.
The Booky Mom 
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