Our January edition of Adventure Club highlighted Medieval Times! We focused on knights and defending one's castle from dragons or other invaders. Here's what we did!
As usual, we set up the program room in stations: first by the door was the opportunity to enter your name into a prize drawing, as well as a packet of puzzles and word searches related to our theme.
In the middle of the room, we made our own dragons. This was very simple craft: toilet paper rolls wrapped in white paper and a dragon pattern printed out on more white paper. The kids colored their dragons as they wanted (they nearly all had green dragons, which surprised me - they're usually very creative and out of the box), then cut out the pieces and assembled them by following my coworker's instructions.
Along one wall, we had a station for designing your family crest. We had pre-cut crest shapes and provided posters with common symbols found on medieval crests and what they stood for. We also gave the meaning of different colors. This was the least popular table of the program, but there were a couple kids who studied the posters very carefully and took their crest designs incredibly seriously.
Along another side wall, we had our catapult construction station. We built catapults out of rubber bands and popsicle sticks (well, craft sticks, to be precise), with bottle caps as ammunition holders. Closely situated to the catapult construction station was the catapult practice lane, where kids could test their catapults and make changes as they saw fit. These combined stations prompted some experimentation as kids tried to discover the right number of craft sticks to use to maximize the catapult firing distance. Many kids set up their dragons along the practice lane and attempted to destroy them using their catapults and their ammo (mini-marshmallows, of course). Not many people were successful, but they tried as many different things as they could.
We didn't have as many attendees this time around - not sure if it was just a bad day or they weren't as interested in the topic (but, I mean, catapults!). But the ones who came had fun. I'm looking forward to our future Adventure Club meetings - we have one left before we take a break for the summer. Do you have any topics that you think would make excellent editions of Adventure Club?
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