Ideas for Decorating a Classroom Like a Ship
If you're teaching about Columbus, Magellan, Marco Polo, the Spanish Armada or any other of the great nautical episodes in history, doing up the classroom to look like a ship can really bring the story home to students. Pet parrots and monkeys tearing up the place might prove a bit much, but there are plenty of other things you can do to get the sense of the sea into the classroom.
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The Boat in the Classroom
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Depending on how far you want to take the project, you might want to try and create the sense of being stuck in a cramped ship, surrounded in every direction by water, by building a ship in the classroom. Well, not actually building it, but you can think about arranging pallets to make a wooden deck and rail in a ship shape running down the center of the classroom. You can then involve the whole class in painting the walls and ceiling and even the floor with a mural of the sea.
Belowdecks
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If this is going to be too disruptive, you could limit yourself to decorating the room to look like a cabin on-board the boat. Use lower energy light bulbs and thick lampshades to create a bit of gloom, and stick wooden paneling onto the walls, or paint over the walls with a wood grain effect. This will take a bit of time as you will have to draw a wood graining tool across the whole painted surface (see Resources). Turn the windows into portholes by placing large rings of wood over them. You can wrap these in foil to give a metal effect. You can even build a few cannons, using lengths of large-diameter rigid plastic pipe mounted onto wooden trolleys, which have been cut down slightly to serve as gun carriages.
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Accessorize
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If fundamentally redecorating the classroom is too much, then create the nautical theme by adding the right accessories to the room. Hang ropes and rope ladders across the wall and ceiling. Mount some old maps up on the walls; you can often get prints of these done at local libraries, and add the aged paper effect yourself using cold tea. Hang up some hammocks, and store things in old wooden chests and barrels. Coil ropes in the corner, and maybe paint some balls black and pile them into a pyramid to look like cannon balls.
Operations Room
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For a more modern feel, set the class up like the operations room of a naval ship, with banks of computers arranged opposite each other and a large projector at the front showing the supposed position of the ship, other ships and any land nearby. You will need to dim the lights and use the kind of green or red uplighting recognizable from films such as "The Hunt for Red October." You will need at least one thing that makes a "ping" sound. You can play this sound from a computer by turning a sound from a sound effects website on loop (see Resources). This setup is a great way to get students ready and engrossed in a high-pressure teamwork challenge using the computers.
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References
Resources
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