El Caracol
We recently finished our history chapter on the Age of Exploration. I have absolutely loved archaeology ever since I found out it existed when I was in the fourth grade, so I usually delve into the ancient Mayan, Aztec, and Incan civilizations a bit more heavily. The Mayan ruins in Central America are just fascinating. El Caracol (literally, "the shell") a Mayan observatory, has evidence of around twenty-one different astronomical events built into it. After we learned about a few of those, using a compass with degree marks, we marked the location of the sunrise and sunsets of the winter and summer solstices (for Maryland, as close as I could find degrees) on the classroom walls. I'm tempted to mark these out on the front lawn of the school. Now wouldn't that be fun?
