let’s create at home – Kavad

One of a series of workshops for home-educators.

Try them as a family or form a group with friends on-line and share your ideas and creations as they unfold.

4 Kavad:

This challenge is for you to make a Kavad (an Indian story shrine) and use it to retell the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of his round table.

You will need…

a big and a small cardboard box,
more cardboard,
strong tape,
drawing paper,
bits of wool and material,
paint, glue, pencils, felt pens,
and ideally two or more wooden dolly pegs (although you can improvise and make your 3-D figures how you like),

So what is a Kavad?

It’s one box, with many decorated doors and at its heart a little shrine containing 3D models of the hero/heroine of the tale. Its ideal for telling epic sagas and life stories of the great and good.

It comes from an area of India called Rajasthan, which is home to families of kavad-makers and tellers, who tour the countryside telling the epic tales of the Gods. This Youtube clip shows extracts from a 2009 film ‘Makers of Tales’ which talks about their lives:

And here’s how to make a Kavad from a big and a small cardboard box…

So now you need to decorate it with pictures that will help you tell the story of the adventures of King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table and make the figures that go in the shrine.

Choose the stories that you know. If you don’t already know many, click HERE! for tales of King Arthur’s Shropshire.

Members of the Home Ed. Group made a King Arthur Kavad at their meeting in November 2019. As you can see, they did not stick too closely to the instructions but used their creativity to come up with some different ideas which involved some modifications to the box.