One of the best 3D projects I have made for school was a very creative Great Wall of China at the end of sixth grade, for a China project. It was made with totally normal things you would find in almost every house. Together my mom and I used our creativity and the material available at hand to put together a model of the Great Wall.
It was a warm late Saturday afternoon when we decided to start making the model. The project was due the next week and I didn’t have more time to work on it. For a whole ten minutes, we just sat in the living room, brainstorming. Many ideas popped up, each worse than the one before. I had thought about getting supplies from Michael’s, but it would take up too much time. Finally, the obvious idea of using cardboard to build the Great Wall model reached my slow brain. I had almost fallen asleep when I thought of it. When I mentioned it to my mom, who had also fallen asleep, she agreed readily and went to work immediately.
My mom cut cardboard pieces into the rough shape of the battlements, while I painted a rectangular piece of cardboard green to act as the bottom. Then we faced another problem that later was solved by creativity. The outside of the Great Wall was done, but the inside structure was basically like a card house. My mom continued working on the details, while I tried to solve this roadblock. My mind started to wander off topic and I thought about the shipment of a fountain that had come in. I wondered why the styrofoam protecting the package was so squeaky. Then I suddenly had the solution and yelled, “Aha!” so abruptly, my mom jumped and accidently dropped her paintbrush from one hand to the other, leaving a big blotch of green paint. But I hardly noticed that as I strode out to our yard and grabbed all of the big pieces of the styrofoam in the now empty fountain box. Back inside, I cut the styrofoam into rough rectangles and fit them beneath the outside of the Great Wall.
Yet another problem posed itself in front of us. When my mom and I cut the useful styrofoam into the shape of a mountain to set below the actual Wall, we couldn’t paint on it or get the texture of the mountain right. In the end, it was my mom who figured out a solution. She used a bunch of tinfoil to get the rugged shape of the mountain and glued in to the green cardboard. The effect was splendid!
An easier block that stood in our way was how to keep the Great Wall on the mountain. We both knew glue itself wouldn’t enough. In the end, I got a whole bunch of toothpicks and stuck them through the cardboard and into the styrofoam, keeping the wall firmly in place.
The last, and probably the hardest, was how to decorate the hill with “trees.” I didn’t have any fake trees to use, so my mom and I just sat there and thought. I got hungry at one point, and went to the fridge. It was there that I got my idea. There was a bundle of broccoli at the bottom, and I immediately grabbed it, forgetting all about my need for food. I chopped them into smaller pieces, while my mom glued it to the surface of the mountain. Soon the project was finished, standing on the kitchen table.
Had it not have been for the improvising and creating done by my mom and me, we would have never finished the project, fretting about the lack of material. It makes everything much more simple and easy. No matter what your strict parents (cough cough, mom) might think, creativity can be a very useful thing.
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