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DLTK's Educational Activities - Book Report Ideas
Example Diorama - Charlotte's Web

Kaitlyn made this diorama in Grade Three.  

  • Her favorite part:  making the pig
  • Her least favorite part:   making the fence
  • Her mark:  100%

Materials:

  • Basics:
    • shoe box
    • glue
    • scissors
        
  • Background:
    • acrylic paint (red)
    • powerpoint and color printer
    • straw colored (natural) raffia
        
  • Pig (Wilbur)
  • Spider (Charlotte)
    • black pom pom
    • small wiggly eyes
    • dark wool
    • Halloween web cotton
        
  • Fence
    • small wooden sticks (like popsicle sticks)
    • plasticine
        
  • Stool
    • cardboard
    • two corks
        

  • Roof
    • regular cardboard (ex:  old cereal box)
    • green posterboard
    • corrugated cardboard (we got ours from the scrapbooking section of the craft store.

 

The Steps We Took:

You could do this all in one day but we never procrastinate!  It's much more fun (and less stressful) if you do a little each day for a week.

Day 1:  

  • Kaitlyn sketched out her ideas on a piece of paper

  • Kaitlyn searched through the "craft cupboard" for what we had on hand and for inspiration.

  • Kaitlyn made a list of materials she thought she would need - dividing her list into things we had and things we needed to buy.

  • Mommy reviewed Kaitlyn's sketch and materials list.
      

  • Kaitlyn painted the entire outside of the box red to look like a barn (we had the red acrylic paint on hand) after covering the table with newspaper.

  • Kaitlyn washed her brushes and tidied the kitchen table -- acrylic paint dries in under an hour, so she was able to tidy up without setting anything aside to dry.

Day 2:

  • Kaitlyn and mommy sat down at the computer for a lesson on Powerpoint.

  • Mommy designed an entire "background" for the walls of the barn while Kaitlyn watched.

  • Mommy deleted everything she'd done (to Kaitlyn's horror *grin*) and then Kaitlyn designed her own background for the walls of the barn while mommy watched.

  • Kaitlyn printed her design (about 4 sheets), cut her sheets to fit the "walls" of her barn and glued them to the back and sides (inside).
      

  • Kaitlyn chopped raffia into small bits (to look like straw) and glued this all over the floor of her box

  • Kaitlyn glued wiggly eyes and bits of wool to a black pom pom to make a spider -- everything fell off!

  • Kaitlyn and mommy hot glued wiggly eyes and bits of wool to a black pom pom -- this time it worked (hot glue!)
      

  • Kaitlyn hot glued Charlotte to the side of her barn, toward the front.

  • at this point we had run out of supplies we happened to have lying around the house so we made a trip to our local craft store to pick up sculpey clay, plasticine, wooden sticks and corrugated cardboard

Day 3:

  • Kaitlyn made her pig with sculpey clay -- one large oval for the body, four stubby cylinders for legs, pinched triangles for the ears and a coiled snake for the tail.  Bits of white and blue made the eyes.

  • Instruct children to jam their pieces together firmly (so the figure doesn't fall apart after baking  

  • Instruct children not to leave any "skinny pieces" sticking out (for example, make sure you push the tail against the body) -- skinny pieces will break off easily

  • Instruct the children to make sure the piece stands up before you bake it (make the legs short and stubby, not wobbly and skinny)

Day 4:

  • after a lot of trial and error -- mom, dad, grandpa and Kaitlyn managed to build a fence for Wilbur

  • Clumps of plasticine were hotglued to the bottom of the shoebox floor

  • Kaitlyn pushed her fence sticks into the plasticine to act as fence posts

  • The fence cross pieces were hot glued to the fence posts -- everyone got a bit burned during the process (make sure you use a low-temp crafting hot glue gun not a carpentry one so that no one gets seriously injured)

Day 5:

  • Kaitlyn and daddy made the stool:

    • Daddy sawed two corks in half -- to make four corks half as tall

    • Kaitlyn glued a square of cardboard to the four half corks

    • Kaitlyn used a very creative swirly painting technique (with red and brown acrylic paint) to decorate her stool

Day 6:

  • Kaitlyn made her roof -- it was very challenging.

  • She traced her shoebox onto a piece of cardboard and added a "Hip roof" type shape to the top

  • She cut out this cardboard shape and glued it to the back of her shoebox
      

  • Kaitlyn cut a piece of green posterboard (as long a strip as possible) as wide as the shoebox -- she left "tabs" on the posterboard.

  • Kaitlyn draped her green posterboard over her roof and folded the tabs around the cardboard and taped them on
      

  • Kaitlyn cut "shingles" from corrugated cardboard.
      

  • Starting from the bottom of the roof, she taped these onto the green posterboard, overlapping each a little so it would look like a shingled roof

Day 7:

  • Kaitlyn did a few final touches, arranging all her characters as she liked them
      

  • She wrote out her name, the name of the book and author's name and attached this "label" to the front of her project

 

 

  

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