Friday, April 24, 2009

School Project

My son, who is in sixth grade, had to create something to do with an historical event for a recent school project. It took him some time before he could actually decide what he wanted to create, with the materials we had on hand, but he finally decided to build a Pueblo Indian dwelling. We all worked on it together and it was actually pretty fun to create.

We started with a small styrofoam cooler and worked from there. The Pueblo Indians used "oven domes" to cook with, so we made one of those out of homemade salt dough, then we glued small stones in a circle, put a few twigs in it, sprinkled some of my husband's red chalk from his chalk line tool for embers, and sprinkled some ash from our pellet stove around that to create a small fire pit, and we glued some twigs down next to that for a wood pile that we topped off with some cotton to create a smoke effect. I took some small pieces of leather and we created rugs out of them and decorated them with some of the symbols that the Pueblos used to communicate with. Then finally, we topped it all off with a few mini clay pots filled with various items such as corn and indian seed beads.

It turned out really good and he was so proud of it. His teacher gave him the best grade possible, and while we were at the Education Fair, we heard several people who were looking at it talk about how cool it was, which made Brenden even more proud of himself.

Here's some pictures:

View from the side



View from the front



Corn in a clay pot & clay pitcher



Fire pit and stack of logs



View from above

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow Shannon that is amazing. Your son should be proud of himself. Hope he got an A! :) Happy Friday!

Christy said...

Very nice. I only hope to be this helpful and creative when it comes time to work on this type of stuff with my boys. Great job, your son deserves to feel proud.