Project: Coat of Arms

I've been looking forward to doing this project since I got my plans together last year! I know it's sad, but I remember making coat of arms in school and loved it, so much so that I made many more on my own at home. So I was sure to participate in this project!


We started out by looking at some different coat of arms on google pics. That way princess could get an idea of what they looked like. We then decided how we wanted to divide our fields on the shield template from the SOTW activity pages. (As a side note, I recently downloaded the activity pages from Peace Hill Press and I'm kicking myself for not getting the activity guide this year. We loved it last year, but I thought I could pull it together on my own, wrong-get the activity guide, it's worth the money!) Anyways here's princess drawing her fields...
We then chose a symbol to go in the center of our shield. You could choose an animal, a man-made object (like a castle) or something from nature. We decided to go with animals. Princess chose a rabbit; I chose a turtle, great mascot, I know. We colored and cut out our animals.
Next we chose our colors, You are suppose to choose one metal (gold, silver or copper) and a color or colors for the coat of arms. Since we didn't have any metallic crayons or paint, we decided that the yellow colored pencil would be our gold. I opted for one additional color, princess opted for a few more...
We pasted our symbol in the middle of our shield. Then we chose a brief motto and wrote it under our shield. Here are the finished products...
We really enjoyed this project. Princess even went on to make another shield later that day. Gotta love when learning is fun!

History Project: Building a Castle

We started studying castles this week so we decided to make one of our own. I've been saving toilet paper tubes and paper towel tubes for weeks so that we would have enough for towers. I would have saved cereal boxes too, but cereal is kinda expensive here, so we don't eat it regularly, instead we used cardstock. We started by laying out the design.

This was so that we knew how many pieces we needed to paint :). Next we mixed some black and white paint to make grey and then we started to paint.

And we painted and painted, I really recommend spray paint for this step, as we painted for nearly an hour! Once all the pieces were done, we let them dry.

Then we started to assemble our castle. It was at that point that I realized that we should have painted both sides, but since we were out of paint there's not much we could do. We used masking tape to put it together, but again I recommend that you use a hot glue gun. It would make the job much easier!

Our castle had 4 towers, with two more guard towers outside, a peasants house, a peasants jail on the other side, a king's great hall and a moat.

We were both very pleased with the finally product, plus we had alot of fun making it!

Project: Making An Illuminated Book

I thought that I would share more about the project we did last week as I thought others might enjoy seeing a closer look. I found this website http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1220_gothic/make_book.php when I was doing research for our study of the Middle Ages. It looked like something that my princess would enjoy so I scheduled it into our plans.

Princess worked on coloring the pages while I was reading aloud her history. When she was finished; I had her make up a story to go with the pages. Her story was the medieval version of Mary and Joseph, kinda cute huh? She then asked me to write in cursive because she wanted it to be pretty.We then made a "golden" cover for the book. This was a neat project for princess and it helped her to understand how long it really took to make books in the middle ages. She has a new found appreciation for monks and for how precious books were from that time period, which is exactly what I was hoping for.