SNOW DAY! Castle and catapult craft for everyone home in their castles!

OK, so it’s a bit of a stretch to tie this in with our Armor of God…
I just really want to include it because it’s very cool and very fun.

Check out how we revisited this craft for another Medieval Birthday Party this year with 10 year old boys.

Yes, we managed to get about 6 or 7 eight year old boys to do crafts at Joseph’s party back in 2009.
We did have a responsible parent (me) building the catapults before the party (with glue guns) and older sister Em and Uncle Steve and I helped the boys build their castles by cutting the slits.
We also cut some of the castellation trim as the boys began to get distracted. =)

Ammunition: mini-marshmallows
Castle: corrugated cardboard, foam pipe insulation (or a skinny pool noodle or toilet paper or paper towel rolls or construction paper), popsicle sticks, craft foam sheets, glue, scissors and a craft knife
Catapult: corrugated cardboard, clothespeg, 2 corks, popsicle stick (the bigger ones if possible), a bottle cap and a glue gun

(Sorry for the computer generated pictures…this craft was pre-blog!
I never used to photograph crafts in process!)

Castle

The turrets of the castles were made of plumbing pipe insulation. It is about 1″ in diameter and it has a slit down the entire length. Incidentally, this same plumbing pipe insulation (kind of like a skinny pool noodle) makes excellent swords that are relatively harmless even in the hands of 8 year old boys.

But don’t panic because you don’t have plumbing pipe insulation on hand! You can use a skinny pool noodle or 4 empty toilet paper rolls or paper towel rolls for the towers of the castle. You can even make your own rolls of construction paper: the thicker and tighter the “wall” of the roll, the stronger it will be.

We pushed cardboard into the slit of each piece of pipe insulation for the two side walls. To connect the two side walls into the square castle shape, we carefully cut slits at the quarter marks of the pipe insulation. We pushed popsicle sticks into the slits and glued cardboard pieces to the outside of the popsicle sticks.

If using your own construction paper rolls, you may prefer to glue-gun the cardboard pieces in place, without trying to slit the rolls.

We made 3 cuts (upside down “U”) for the drawbridge on the front side of the castle. We cut the castellations out of craft foam to add the trim to the walls and turrets. The boys liked choosing different colors for their custom castles.

Catapult

The catapult is made by glue-gunning a wooden clothes peg to a cardboard base. Two corks are glued (using a glue gun) to the tail of the clothes peg. A popsicle stick is glued (by glue gun) to the corks as shown and the water bottle cap is glued (also by glue gun) upside down, on the end of the popsicle stick.

The bottle cap is the launch pad for mini marshmallows. Allow the glue dry (and cool) and you are ready to fire the marshmallows, aiming for the inside of each other’s castles.

Let the games begin!

For our 2nd Medieval Party, we have experimented with the catapults…check these out:

Comments

Tracy says:

March 12, 2011 at 2:32 am

WOW! This looks great! I’m going to forward this post to a friend of mine who is doing Medieval History with her children. Love your blog! And thanks for linking up to NOBH! It’s always so fun to meet other Catholic bloggers!

Jessica says:

February 10, 2011 at 1:09 am

Oooh! Thank you so much for sharing the link to this post! My boys would just love this! In fact, one of my son’s will turn 11 this summer, and he would probably love a Medieval Party! Especially since that is what they are studying in History this year. 🙂

I hope you do have a chance to post some of your birthday parties. I’d love to see them!

By the way, we have a number of the Arma Dei cards – which have been given to my children by their Uncles – and they are great. I will have to take a look at your other products. God bless!