The Castle Defenders Get Together!

If the girls are going to get together (aka Castle Keepers) then the boys need to have some fun, too.  Right?  In a slightly less organized and formal group than the Castle Keepers, we are going to be having meetings with the boys while the girls are having their gathering.

The boys club is called…. Castle Defenders!

They are a fine bunch of boys don’t you think?

My husband, Russell has agreed to help with the classes but since he was unavailable yesterday, I had the honor of doing it.  I love working with young children. They are just so special to me.

The first thing we did was to make firestarters.  Elk hunting camp is just around the corner and the kids all love to have their own campfire.  Of course, they end up using quite a bit of matches to do this, so these firestarters will give them a good start when making their own fire.  They are supposed to burn for a minimum of 3 minutes and up to 5 minutes, I think.

Don’t worry.  At elk hunting camp all of the fires are started within eyesight of the adults.

To make firestarters, I followed this You Tube video.

If you want to make them you will need:

cardboard egg cartons

sawdust or dryer lint

paraffin wax

The boys had to cut the wax up into small pieces.

We placed the small pieces of wax into a can and placed the can into a pot that was filled partway with water.  We turned on the heat until the wax was completely melted.

In the meantime, we filled egg carton cells with sawdust and compacted it.

The next step was to pour melted wax over the sawdust. I found out that it takes a lot more wax than I anticipated to really cover the individual egg cells up.

Once it hardens you cut the lid of the egg carton off and then cut each individual egg cell apart.

We then headed for State Land that was nearby and learned how to leave trail markers whether using stones, twigs or grass. I had made copies for everyone from this site.

We practiced making the signs and then we split into two teams.  The first team was given 5 minutes to leave trail markers for us to follow.  The point was not to lose us but to be sure we would find them.

After we found them, we then took the trail with a 5 minute head start to leave markers for them to follow.

We finally finished up our activities with Red Indian.  Red Indian is a game that Charlotte Mason talks about in her books.  I wrote about it here in this post – An Outdoor Game when Justus was just 4 years old. We’ve played it for years and my kids have always loved it.

This boy thought he would be sneaky and hide up in the tree thinking I would just be looking at ground level.  But I caught him. 🙂

Justus was great at remaining undetected.  My camera did not do what I wanted it to do yesterday, so a lot of these pictures are overexposed.  Believe it or not, he’s hiding on the other side of this bush, laying flat on the ground.

With them being this savvy, how could I help but NOT find them. 😀

We had a great time. I don’t have a lot of ideas of what I want to do with these boys so I’ll be doing plenty of research looking for useful and fun activities/handicrafts.

An update on what the Castle Keepers were doing while we were out in the sun and wind is coming up!