Enchanted Palace

I just came back from London and loooooooooved it- what a friendly city with a mixture of old and new.  I was reminded of this site that I bookmarked sometime ago, from the city's Historic Royal Palaces attractions.  Though we didn't visit Kensington Palace, the subject of this site, we did get to the Tower of London! Enchanted Palace is a site designed to teach about the Royals of Kensington through the ages as students solve puzzles in order to be transported back to the present day (a broken clock sends you back in time at the beginning of the activity, which could be reviewed with students probably in the course of one session).  You need to collect clock pieces after following the Royal Family's directions, enduring their amusing insults along the way.

Language Lens

• The site has a clear and specific historical purpose, but also serves to offer great language-learning opportunities as students need to process many directions and solve problems, navigating the palace and dealing with spatial and temporal concepts.  
• The activity could be used well to explore the story grammar element of setting, and would likely align with US curricululm around continents and countries (grade 2-3) or to provide background knowledge about the English monarchy in relation to American History.