Some Indian-Inspired Architecture For Your Thursday

We're finishing up our Indian Unit in sixth grade, and made these pop out buildings:

We'd looked at some architecture from India, and I left up the architecture slide for them to look at as they worked (you can download my 'Art and Culture of India' Smart Notebook file here).  We used tagboard and patterns for the building shape (some people are very against using patterns--I'm not one of those people.  If the objective isn't cutting/gluing on their own, I figure what's the harm in a pattern?!).

 

Students were allowed to alter the pattern to their liking.  They just folded their 12 x 18" tagboard, put the fold with arrows on the fold, traced, had me check it and cut.  I added the "have Mrs. Fresia check it" part years ago after so many "I need a new paper/I cut mine wrong"s that drove me nuts.
After cutting they save their scraps to make little hinges to attach their Indian palaces to a background paper.  Everyone got a 12 x 18" blue piece of construction paper to fold and glue their paper hinges and palaces to. Students only needed four or six paper hinges--2 or 3 on each side. The cutting and gluing honestly took an entire 40 minute class period.  A few students got all that done and started their [symmetrical] drawing/designing, but many didn't.

A class' worth of work folded and ready to be displayed.

Students designed their buildings however they wanted, as long as they were symmetrical.  We drew in pencil and colored with metallic colored pencil.  Some added construction paper crayon to the background/blue paper, but that wasn't a necessary step.  I also kept up a print of the Taj Mahal for them to see the size and intricate carvings.

This one shows the pop out effect well--
building folded going out,
background folded going back.

I've got two classes' worth of work displayed in the library:

But I really don't have a great place to display 3D work in my building, which is sometimes a frustration.
Here's an amazing one from an amazing girl who is pretty much always amazing:

Happy Thursday!