Diorama That!

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It's what you learn
after you know it all that counts.  

~ Harry S Truman

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I love that daughter of the year #2 is getting old enough to have school projects now.  Not those little projects like, make a poster of your family or create a collage.  I like those projects too, but I was excited for a big one.  This one involved research, reading books, internet searches, and, in the end, putting everything she learned into a final project of her choice.  The options were endless but she picked diorama.  

I like to think I am not the only parent out there who did not know what a diorama was, and therefore, Google and I became good friends.  This simple search brought with it a great deal of information.  I learned a diorama is something I created many times in my childhood from empty Kleenex boxes.  I found a website that refers to dioramas as crafts and even has a place you can order little plastic figures for them they refer to as toobs.  Some people really get into their dioramas.  The civil war reenactment dioramas I saw in Google images were quite impressive.  So, where am I going with this?  Google compelled me to help daughter of the year #2 make one impressive diorama centering around one endangered species assigned by her teacher - the orangutan.   

Enter, one empty shoebox...and that's about it.  Yep, I had nothing at home.  No felt, no plastic orangutans, no little trees, nothing crafty to aid us in making this project.  Then I remembered the craft kit that daughter of the year #2 received two years ago that she has barely touched.  Inside we found clay and floam (quite cool if you have never used it), paint and a paintbrush, and a small carving tool.  Screw Hobby Lobby!  I had this one in the bag!  

And so began the project as daughter of the year #2 and I sat at the dining room table and made little orangutans out of floam - bright orange floam!  So, she painted them with brown paint after we sculpted them showcasing their sad eyes and giant hands just like she had learned in her research.  But wait!  We needed trees.  So, in my diorama search, I found a website that showed how to make trees out of simple wire and clay.  Easy peasy!  Except, I had no wire.  But I did have old floral wire and after combining many strands of that, we used our small amount of brown clay to make one heck of a trunk.  Cotton balls and green chalk completed the tops.  A trip outside produced grass and sticks. We printed a background and voila!  One complete orangutan diorama!  And I must admit, it was spectacular.  

As I sat back and admired our masterpiece (and fought the urge to play with it), I realized I might have gotten a bit too into the diorama.  However, if resourcefulness and spending $0 on a class project makes one a mom of the year, I think I just landed myself a front row seat in this race!   Take that diorama!  

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