This week we learned all about castles and the people who live in them. We had so much fun. This week was great for the kids because they were actually interested in the theme! So here are some activities we did:
Will is matching upper case magnets to lower case letters written on a castle I drew.
Ruth doing a 100 piece castle puzzle
Inside the castle: counting stairs, dragon eggs and royal jewels (he LOVED this activity, which was surprising, but he asked to do it several times).
Building castles out of shapes, first one that I traced the shapes and then they made their own.
Decorating shields with specific shapes and words. Ruth had a hard time following instructions here. And I was surprised that they both had a hard time drawing squares and triangles.
Spelling words and stamps: king, queen, crown, castle, prince, princess, dragon
Here they once again had to make a castle using specific shapes (we clearly needed more practice drawing them) and then decorated our castles with stickers of dragons and princesses.
Stained glass windows
ABC mouse, sometimes they want to choose their own activities. I'm glad that they want to take initiative in their own education. The letter videos have been priceless to Will's mastering the alphabet.
Playing "Castle Keep"
More spelling practice, later she put them in alphabetical order
Drawing patterns on the Queen's dress
Ruth worked on a Venn Diagram of the similarities and differences between living in a castle and living in a house. She did great and didn't even need help thinking of any answers. Will worked on more patterns as well as a page of "More or Less."
Building towers with pattern blocks.
And Friday's are usually more relaxed, so today we made cookies inspired by "Dutchess Bakes a Cake" and then made a huge castle built out of garbage we've saved over the last week and a half.
I turned all the boxes inside out and re-glued them and covered the juice bottles in paper bags so we could paint everything. It was lots of fun.
Other books we especially enjoyed this week were, The Knight Who Was Afraid of the Dark, Whinnie the Lovesick Dragon, King Bidgood's in the Bathtub, and Princess Hyacinth. There are SO many books on castles, kings, dragons, knights and princesses' that we had a huge pile to take home with us this week. We also learned a lot about castles because of David Macaulay's book, "Castle."
