All Things Beautiful: Hands-On Projects

For this project, you will need:
Jello
Mini Marshmallows
Fruit Roll Up
Pull Apart Twizzlers
Handmade Labels, if desired

1. Dermis For the dermis, you will need to make a packet of Jello, following the directions on the package. We made cherry, but any flavor will do. Pour it into a small square dish.

2. Hypodermis Before you put the Jello in the refrigerator, fill the top of the Jello with mini marshmallows. Now, put it in the refrigerator to set properly.

This is what your Jello with marshmallows should look like when you put it in the refrigerator.

3. Epidermis with Pores When the jello is set, run the knife around to “unstick” it from the sides and plop it out onto a big enough plate. Ours did not come out smoothly, but that is okay because it made it look more real that way. Now you can add the epidermis.

Unroll a Fruit Roll Up and poke holes in it with a skewer or toothpick.

4. Hair Some of these holes will be pores and some will be for the hair.

Pull licorice apart and cut them into desired lengths for the hairs and stick ’em in your pre-poked holes.

You may need to enlarge some of the holes in order for the licorice to fit.

5. Labels Now you can label the different parts using handmade labels, either typed on the computer, as we did, or handwritten.

Hands-on projects come in all sorts of varieties. Sometimes they are just getting out plastic soldiers and setting up a battle scene for explanation of some aspect of military strategy. Sometimes it is completing an art project that relates to topics in other areas such as science or history. Usually those projects only take one day at the most. And then, there are more extensive hands-on projects that take several days to complete. The archaeology dig projects (cake archaeology, sandbox-Lego archaeology) were in the last category. They spent some time one day setting them up, another day digging them out, a third day sketching the finds. There were days in between those activity days as well so that they had time to contemplate and assimilate what they were learning. The last piece of the project was documenting the project in their history notebooks.

Quentin's (age 9) history notebook page, with a couple of sentence narration.

They began documenting the project by putting some photos I had printed out on a page and then writing a title with bubble writing. Then they wrote a sentence or two, describing what was in the pictures.

We worked on verbs this week in English, so James picked out some verbs (as well as one adjective) to use as captions for one of his history notebook pages.