Castle

For one of our projects this semester, our professor had us get into groups and create our own medieval castle. Initially, this project was super intimidating to me. While I chose to partner up with some very creative partners, figuring out to initially begin was hard. But, once we started constructing the castle, the project turned out to be way more fun than expected! This project taught me so much about the benefits of having students create in the classroom. As my partners and I were working on this, we were forced to put ourselves into the mindset of what strategic-thoughts/reasonings people building these castles must have been thinking. For example, how tall or thick to build the boundary of the castle and how many guarding towers would be needed to keep the enemies out. Overall, this would be such a great activity to use in a classroom. One great way I would love to incorporate this in a class would be by having each group study a castle from medieval times, and then have them use their research to construct a replica! This could also be utilized after a medieval unit where groups would have to construct their own strategically built castles!

While I believe this project would be best incorporated in an upper elementary classroom, here is a blog a first grade teacher wrote about a castle unit she completed with her students-including a small part about how her class created a larger castle together out of cardboard:
http://adayinfirstgrade.com/2016/02/a-kindergarten-unit-on-castles.html

Here are a few pictures of our castle: