Monday, March 31, 2014

Paper Pyramids Make Us Happy


This is a fun little lesson I do sometimes with third grade when we talk about Egypt.  Years ago I made a super-simple power point showing different scenes from Egyptian tombs, and they use those for inspiration.  The first several class periods are spent drawing: they get a 12 x 12 piece of paper, fold it diagonally (making a triangle), unfold and fold diagonally using the opposite corners, then pick ONE corner to cut up to the other fold.  So now they have a sort of diamond shape with a slit.  I have them write "floor" on one triangle next to the slit, and their name on the back of the same part where they wrote "floor".  They draw with pencil, trace with extra-fine permanent marker, and color with colored pencils:




  
Although they look like they're pyramid-shaped in these photographs, we keep them unglued and two dimensional until the very end (this way, they fit in table folders and in our drawers).
When it seems like most are getting close to finished with the drawing,we papier mache up some boxes and mummies:




I have the whole class start with making the box (some are better than others):


We do three days of papier mache-ing: a newspaper day (using newspaper strips) a phone book day (using torn up yellow pages) and a paper towel day (those brown school paper towels have to be good for something!!!).  Then, we paint our mummies white, and our boxes however we want (I only give them primary colors). 

Finally, we glue them all together:





And for my early finishers, we use colored pencils to draw bricks on the back, so we can turn them over to look like this:


I did keep all of them (stored in boxes labeled with teacher names) for the art show.  Thursday, April 17, I can't wait!!!  They'll look fabulous!



No comments:

Post a Comment

Pin It