Young Isaac had his first Social Studies project of the school year. He had to re-create a scene / scenario from his Social Studies book. Isaac decided to make an "authentic" Indian home. My first thought was, "here goes another 40 bucks."
Isaac instantly went outside & started collecting supplies. He said, "the Indians didn't run out to the store for supplies, so neither will I!" So after spending a few hours outside... he ended up with a fair amount of building materials.
Everything he needed he found from around the house & declared his project, "green."
The next step for the young building contractor was to prepare his work space & develop the land & water. He actually added real dirt to the land (brown paint) & (cooking) sea salt to the water (blue paint).
Yet again, his creativity impressed me.
Luckily for Isaac, the paint he used was from my home art studio so it was a super quick dry formula...
Not even 30 minutes later, Isaac was working on his building frame. This part of the project might have been one of the more challenging areas.
Isaac wanted the sticks to be the same size in height & diameter so he ended up making a few more trips outside to try to match his sticks... I mean "logs." The Indians used logs to build their frames.
For the roof, Isaac cut the bottom of one of my baskets out. Normally I would have been totally against him destroying MY property but for the love of education & Social Studies... Cut on my dear boy... cut on.
The sides of the building were the other difficult areas of the project. This is where my help was needed so I couldn't take the step by steps. I will tell you that I held the glue gun while Isaac cut & placed the bark & although no children (Isaac) was burnt with the hot glue gun during this area of the project... I was. But like the great someone once said... No pain, No gain!
After the walls were up, I left Isaac alone for a few minutes & came back to a fire pit, benches outside the dwelling & a fully decorated interior. He made little cot like beds & I fire on the inside to keep them warm.
So that concludes Isaac's Indian dwelling for his Social Studies class... on to the eco-system project for Science class.
