Tapestry of Grace Co-op: Building Castles (part 2) and Chess

We have learned more about castles this week.  The kids especially enjoyed an awesome pop-up book that I found!  It's called Castle: Medieval Days and Knights.  It has great descriptions and fun pop-up pieces on every page!


This page shows all of the different rooms found inside a castle and the keep.


Of course, my kids would like the room where the guying is going poop the best!  I feel sorry for the guy downstairs that had to clean this up.


We read that being a knight wasn't all about fame and glory.  It was a dangerous job too!


I really love the great pop-up scenes in this book.  Look at this king's feast where he is knighting someone.  Isn't that cute?


At co-op this week, the grammar students finished up their castles.  There was lots of messy paint so you know Rachel had a great time!


Ta-da!  The royal palace of Rachel painted in silver and turquoise, her favorite (although not realistic) colors.


For the dialectic students, I taught them how to play chess.  It is a great game for this time period.  It involves all of the medieval characters like pawns (peasants), castles, knights, bishops, kings, and queens but it also involves strategy like that which would need to be used in fighting an enemy during this time.  We have one chess set but two awesome friends loaned me sets so I had 3 sets total for the 5 kids to play with.  Nicholas played against me for the first round.


He was so intense and focused as we played.  We should really play this game more often.  There are lots of articles about benefits of playing chess like problem solving skills, mental acuity, emotional intelligence, and more.


I really played my best but Nicholas enjoyed winning the game.  We will have to have a rematch!


Before we were done with our chess games, the littles came in and watched for a while.  They couldn't wait for the big kids to be done so they could take their turn at chess too!


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