Kids at the Fishtown Recreation Center listened to the story Mr. King’s Castle by Genevieve Cote. This story is about a lion King who wants to make a BIG castle and starts taking apart the land for his reconstruction. As he builds his new castle his animal friends start to lose their homes. Although Mr. King is proud of his big home he realizes it’s not worth the displacement of his friends. So, he deconstructs his castle and returns the pieces back to the land he shares with his other animal friends.
The illustrations were very geometric so we had the kids design their own castles by using pre-cut shapes from different colored paper. Together, we reviewed the three shapes that would be used to build our castles: triangle, rectangle and square. We discussed arranging the shapes on the paper to create a building-like structure.
As the kids were working we gave them crowns that we had prepared before the class just like the one that Mr. King wears in the book! Then, as the students finished their castle images they could move on to decorating their crowns.
