Thursday, January 27, 2011

Knight Party: Storm the Castle Catapult Game


What kind of knight games can you play for a winter, likely indoors, Knight Party?  Are there instructions somewhere on the web for a catapult you could make and use inside... like on a table?

Yes, yes, yes!  After a little searching, I found exactly what I was looking for, here:

I mostly followed the directions for making a teeny tiny catapult, but substituted colored duct tape for all but the hinge, thinking that the kindergartners might be hard on regular masking tape. I also used craft sticks rather than popsicle sticks. So, I had to adjust the dimensions a bit as craft sticks are wider than popsicle sticks.


For "boulders", the directions say to use crumpled paper. I wanted something a little more festive for the party, so I cut squares out of a dark green piece of packing foam (soft) that I had lying around.  I snipped the edges to give them a cut-stone look.  However, when I test fired them, they were too light to fly.  This was the morning of the party, AACK!  I quickly soaked them in a paste of corn starch and baking soda then set them on the heater to dry.   This worked great!  The added weight was just perfect, and the white color with green foam underneath looked even more like mini-boulders.  One drawback though:  the coating comes off the boulders as white dust eventually.
I didn't want the boys to fire at each other, trying to keep this as non-violent as possible, so I made two castle targets. The knights were having so much fun targeting the castle that firing against each other never came up.  Actually, it still hasn't, even though the catapults are still up/played with a month after the party.
For a castle, the "stormthecastle" site has directions and an example. I made our two castles from one piece of foam board and a craft knife (exacto-blade).  Again, the kiddos really don't seem to care about the quality of the art.... They just had a blast (literally) firing the boulders.  I didn't assign points for the targets (windows, etc.). We made a big hurrah for all the shots and everyone got a prize (knight finger puppet and cool looking bouncy ball/catapult boulder that we would use in a later game.



Castle Parts0001

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