Forgot How Great These Are

This castle-on-a-hill lesson is a lesson I used to do with first grade years ago at my old school/old district.  I no longer do it with a grade level because my room is TINY at my current school and they take up SO MUCH room while they're in process, but they're perfect for my [small] adaptive art groups:

Students rolled out clay the first day and the paras and I helped them to cut one straight edge and one castle-line edge. We then wrapped the clay around cardboard tubes and cut doors and windows.  These dried and were fired.  
While all the drying/firing was going on, students used papier mache to build hills on cardboard circles saved from frozen pizza:

This is actually the final layer.
First we crumpled up newspaper and taped it down to form our hill.
Next we papier mache'd a newspaper strip layer,
then a yellow pages strip layer from the phone book,
and finally a layer of dyed-green-with-tempera
mix of water and the kind you can buy in a bag
 (Celluclay, I think it's called).

When our papier mache dried, it's REALLY hard, like kind of concrete feeling (maybe that's the Celluclay?!).  Then we used tissue paper squares to glue "flowers" around the edge of our hills.

I then gave them some pipe cleaners and green Cloud Clay to create a dragon to guard their castle.  It's almost impossible to write names on wet Cloud Clay, so we let them dry on their [dry] hills (which had their name on the bottom):

Drying on top of a cabinet to keep curious little fingers away.

The day that everything was finally ready, students came in to find their bisque fired castles, and some metallic tempera blocks for them to paint with:

Once the castles were painted, all that was left was to hot glue their castles to their hills (I left the dragons free so they could play with them):

The castles-on-hills fit perfectly in a plastic grocery bag to carry home, and all my students had great success with this project!