Night At The Museum History Unit - Diorama Room

As our studies yesterday took us into the diorama room of the make believe American Museum of Natural History, presented in Night At the Museum, we decided we should try to make a diorama too. Well, okay, I decided we should make a diorama - but the children were pretty good sports about it. They walked with Grandpa down to our local chamber of commerce in search of pictures we could use for the project.

Since this is Montana, they came back with assortment of Lewis and Clark pictures and pamphlets. That settled the theme of our diorama. The girls went out to select some interesting rocks, while the boys sat down to cut and glue pictures into our box.

We used a dryer sheet box, because I liked the way the lid suggests a runway coming out of the box. We turned it on its side, and lined what would become the bottom with green construction paper to represent grass.

Next we chose a grassy mountain scene from one of the pamphlets to use as our background.

Then we cut out a number of interesting animals, and a tee-pee. We glued them to card stock, and then cut them out again, leaving a tab at the bottom. We folded under the tab, and glued it to our grass, to make the animals stand.

We lined the outside of the box with maps and drawings of Lewis and Clark. And finally, we trimmed it with some rocks and twine.

It might not be museum quality, but it will go nicely with our floral foam Easter Island Heads, and our Zoob T-Rex skeleton.

It's great to be a homeschooler!