Rainy day Castle

It was a rainy day today and for over a year now I have been casually saving cereal boxes and cracker boxes for just such an occasion.

We are going to build a fort, or a castle, or something awesome!

We have gathered over 100 boxes, and ended up creating King Arthur’s castle.




I’ve had this idea for some time now, and I never told kids I was gathering the boxes, I just was. I had expectations and an ideal in my mind. When you have expectations, you learn a lot. This is what I learned.

The goal is not the castle or fort. The goal is a really fun experience with your kids. While we were taping boxes, I used the opportunity to ask the kids all sorts of questions about what we were creating. They would hand me boxes, I would tape them shut, and we piled them high. We talked about creating a castle in dinosaur time, in the desert, in the rain forest. Who is the king, what are we doing in the castle, etc. It was a great 45 min of really creative imaginative time.

After we tapped all the boxes back together, Noah’s specific job was making sure we had fun music to listen to. The the boy’s job was to hand me the right size box. They were in charge of creating the shape of the castle, which included a special chair section and bed. And so we tapped the castle together. It was a lot of fun.




I should preface this with the fact that this castle was not the kid’s idea. It was mine. So I couldn’t have expectations that they would love it or want to play in it. For them to love the fort was a gamble.

After the castle was built, the boys had lunch in it. The castle was fun with sheets on top, but not very sturdy, so we eventually had to take the sheets/roof off. I think the boys thought it wasn’t quite as much fun without the roof. They were ready to take it down after about an hour after lunch.

I had to keep reminding myself, the goal was to have an experience with the kids. The goal was not the creation. They were really excited to destroy it, and so continued our experience. They had fun ripping the whole thing apart.



So this morning while it rained, we dreamed up our imagination kingdom, built a castle, and dinosaurs destroyed it before nap time. It was lot of fun.

The other really great part about this project was it is a really creative way to reuse our materials before we recycle them. We talked about that as a family on earth day, and today we got to get creative with our reusing abilities. Go green or go home right?