Sand Castle activity

    

I posted about our Squirrel craft the other day.  This week we did two different activities based on a book.  Another favorite book this week was Sand Castle by Brenda Shannon Yee.  In this story Jen is building a sand castle on the beach and is joined by other children, one at a time, offering their own unique help to make this castle be one spectacular castle.  There is repetitious text, reminding the reader on each page what each child is helping to build (a moat, a path, a wall, a road).  We enjoyed the simple text and the beautiful pictures.  This morning the children brought their alphabet blocks and spools into the living room.  Tabitha told me it was sand (as I told her not to toss the blocks into the room) and they were going to build a sand castle.  We built a castle out of the blocks and used the spools for a moat and a road.  Sorry I didn't get any pictures, but we were just too busy playing.  The block building was spur of the moment, yay, what fun!  However, the sand castle snack we made I had planned in advance.  I knew I wanted to use graham cracker crumbs. But I needed to figure out how to get it to stick together. Knowing butter would help I decided to look for a recipe for pie crust.  I found a recipe for graham cracker pie crust at allrecipes.com.  

We started out by crushing the crackers in a plastic baggie with a can.  The bag ended up with a hole, so I switched to my Magic Bullet and the resulting crumbs were so finely ground it was amazing.

Scooping graham cracker crust mixture into the pie pan

(2 "inside" packages of cinnamon graham crackers, 1/3 cup sugar, 6 Tbs butter, melted.  The mixture truly looks like sand)

Sandy beach

Using a measuring cup to press out parts of our castle.

Dumping them into the sandy beach

Then we used a spoon to form the moat.

The blue jello was the perfect consistency to scoop into the moat to create water.  It had been in the fridge for  approximately for 2 hours.

This was very yummy for dessert after dinner.  We put it in the fridge after making it until we were ready for it.

The only thing I would have liked to have done differently would have been to use a bigger plate so we could have made the wall, path and road.