Theme Park Projects

I try to make at least some of our school holiday activities educational, this one has been going on for nearly two weeks.  I used a combination of a family outing to Chessington and some teaching materials I collected to start the children on a theme park project.

We started with quite a lot of maths - they had a budget and different items cost different amounts, they planned their theme park on squared paper and worked out how much it was costing them.

She's taken the public transport thing proper seriously!

From this map we learn that toilets are important ...

After that  they worked out how much it was costing them to run their theme park each day.

Then they read through a list of "interviews" to decide how much to charge people to get in.

Finally they used all the information to work out how much profit they were making each day.

There's a LOT of maths in here

Not so much and much, much simpler.

There are two different levels of difficulty here for differently aged children.  I also let them use a calculator for the last sheet as it was very repetitive adding.

Anyway, once they knew how much money they'd made after a fortnight they could decide what sort of advertising they could afford.  The first things they made were posters - this involved a lot of looking at posters (they knew remarkably little about them), naming their rides and worlds (and parks!) and thinking about taglines.

A tour round the lakes for just £30?  Bargain!

I'm looking forward to the treets for my famely.

Finally we spent the morning today watching theme park adverts and made our own.  The kids LOVED doing this, and fortunately I have a helpful (sometimes) teenager to edit them for us.  Unfortunately I've had to compress the files to make them small enough to fit on here and the software has added a watermark.  It was very easy to use, however, so I shan't complain (too much!)