Creating Castle Lapbooks for Language Arts
About a week ago my students and I started reading a new book in class. The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli is a lovely story of a young man, Robin, who learns that when life hands him an impossible situation he must look for “a door in the wall”.
To help students experience the book, I’m having them create lapbooks that look like castles. If you have never seen these before, I encourage you to check out the Homeschool Share blog. It has plenty of lapbook ideas and templates that you can use.
Supply List
Directions
1. Fold each flap of the manila folder in toward the center to create two doors.
2. Cut your desired pattern on the top of the castle.
3. On another manila file folder draw the shape of a castle door and cut it out.
4. Use masking tape to attach it to the bottom of the castle like a drawbridge. (See next photo).
5. Cut the toilet paper rolls so that they can be uncurled. Then cut along the tops so they have the same pattern as the top of the castle.
6. Use masking tape to attach the toilet paper rolls both sides of the castle.
7. The castle is now ready to color and decorate.
If you’d like, you can staple extra sheets of notebook paper to the door flap. These are useful for writing descriptions about the book’s main characters. Inside our castles we also created a pocket and attached a long strip of old adding machine paper to keep track of medieval vocabulary that we need to look up while reading.
As we continue our journey through The Door in the Wall we will also continue to add sections to our castle lapbooks. I will share them with you as we do.
This looks like a great way to get your students into the book.I’m sure the writing they do will help them understand and remember the key elements of the story.
~ Michael<><
The Color of Sound
@mgdobishinsky
I think so, Michael. And letting the students come up with their own ideas for pockets or pages to add to the book lets me see their interests that I haven’t thought of.