Making a Diorama
At first when my youngest daughter came home from school and told me that she would have to do a diorama I thought oh no. She had happily chosen the Inuit Indians as her topic. I had some ideas and she had some ideas and with an old shoe box and a few twigs from the back yard I helped her to put together a wonderful project. The only things we did buy were white spray paint and a little piece of faux fur. She made all the bits and pieces but I helped with the glue gun due to the fact that the poor child has been burned twice by glue guns, once a second degree burn over four fingers with a hot glue gun and one by a “cool glue gun”. It obviously wasn’t very cool. Anyway….
We painted the box white to look like snow. The little people were made out of pipe cleaners with either cotton ball, faux fur or felt for their clothing. Below is the person at the dogsled which is little twigs glued together with pipe cleaner dogs, carrying his little brown paper packages.
She had wanted to make an igloo out of sugar cubes but we couldn’t find any at all. So, I took an old candy box and snipped cut it and Sara covered it with little “blocks” of white felt. Then she sprinkled glitter paint on it. Best of all, it can be flipped up uncover a mom with lovely fur coat with a papoose on her back. The papoose is made of a q-tip. Sara used acorns she had collected for her leaf collection as bowls. She glued fur on top of a clothes pin to make a bench/bed and threw down a fur rug to boot. The faux fur was her favorite part of the whole thing, I think, well worth the $5. It might be of interest to note that the Inuit did not normally live in igloos but used them as temporary hunting/fishing homes but they are fun to make. Also I was guessing that in the polar north there weren’t too many trees for firewood but Sara insisted on stacking “logs” which are behind the igloo and are actually little twigs.
We tried to put in as many aspects of their life as we could so there is a man at a fishing hole with “snow shoes” made out of marker colored q-tips. Sara made and excellent bear skin which she glued to the side of the box and drew a fence to hang it on. Do they have grizzlies that far north?? She even covered the inside top of the box with a man fishing for whale with a “harpoon” actually a paper clip, sitting in his dugout canoe, complete with a little stick paddle. The fire was made with sticks and colored foil, which were old birthday decorations. I seem to remember that they burned oil. So this diorama was not 100% accurate.
In the end Sara spent about eight hours on two Saturdays working on her project. I asked her what she thought of it and she said it was fun. This is exactly the kind of thing I was meaning to do while homeschooling but just didn’t get around to. It was a worthy project.
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