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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:

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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