Castle Building

Continuing the obedience unit we moved on to kings and queens specifically of the Middle Ages.  During our first week we focused on how castles were built, why they were used and what the many different aspects of the castle were created for.  Although the children read quite a few books on the subject, my favorite was Castle by David Macaulay along with the DVD by the same name.


At co-op we built a play castle out of cardboard boxes.  We used a refrigerator box, a stove box and a dresser box for the main rooms, two cylindrical rollers from a nearby factory that produces huge rolls of sticky paper and a smaller box for the turret details.


Once the boxes were assembled with cone roofs on the towers and doorways cut out we moved the entire castle into my garage just in time for the rain to start.  This is where we had the kids paint the castle gray.  Since the gray paint would not be dry before the kids had to leave I promised to paint the black block lines onto it during the week so they could play inside at the next co-op.  And thank goodness hubby was around later in the week to help with that because I never would have had it done otherwise.

Their completed castle has three rooms, two towers, a working drawbridge affixed with chains and a moat which is thankfully free of alligators. The best part is that the kids can play inside of this creation of their own each week before and after co-op.