There were several three story diorama pins, as three shoe boxes perfectly illustrate the four stories of the rainforest (forest floor, understory, canopy and emergent layer). So we looked at a few for inspiration and then began working on our own. We gathered shoe boxes from Grammy, shopped Dollar Tree and Walmart and gathered some supplies from home.
I love projects like these. I have just as much fun (or more) as Gracie, and she loves the teamwork. I helped her come up with ideas that I knew she could...and would...execute. There were some parts I had to do, like operating the hot glue gun. But I tried to make sure she was right in it with me on those parts too.
We began by wrapping the boxes in light green tissue paper and then painted over it with a darker green to paste it down and get the color we wanted. Then we stacked and glued the boxes together. Then we cut and painted a wrapping paper tube to resemble tree trunks. Once it was all dry, we glued the tree trunks in place. Next we glued down some moss on the forest floor. Then it got really fun, because we could start "decorating' it.
We made mushrooms for the forest floor out of some homemade play doh we had made a while back. It was probably past it's prime anyway, so it was fitting that it become part of the decay of the forest floor. We twisted crepe paper and tissue paper to make the vines. Even Kiki got in on this part and helped twist some. We illustrated the prop roots of the massive rainforest trees by gluing thin, pokey sticks around the base of the trees. We added some rainforest animals. The monkeys and toucan are stickers, and we found butterflies in the floral section of Dollar Tree. We also included a red eyed tree frog and a poison dart frog, also from Dollar Tree (party favor section).
But, my glue gun was toast by this point (I was already thinking of upgrading my glue gun since we use it so much), so we had to improvise. Rather than loading both girls up and heading to Walmart for a new glue gun in the late evening, I got out a tube of liquid nail glue. Again, something I had to be right on top of, as I didn't want Gracie unsupervised with liquid nail glue! But she got the hang of it pretty quickly and was gluing down rocks to line the river bed in no time all on her own. And I think the river is my favorite part. All her idea and all executed by her. Another favorite part of mine is the real vines we used on the sides and throughout the boxes. We hunted around in the back yard on trees for items to use, but found the dried out vines poking over our fence. It was an awesome find, and the liquid nail glue actually held them in place like a champ!
Gracie's favorite part were the butterflies. She is all girl. The butterflies, rocks, bushes (St. Patrick's Day fake carnations), monkey and toucan stickers, plastic frogs, tissue paper and crepe paper were all from Dollar Tree. Some of the paint was from Walmart, and some we had on hand already. All in all a very fun, family project. Pinterest helped us come up with a great idea. We had fun executing it. It's due tomorrow! Can't wait for the next project!
You can visit our new completed pins board here for some of the pins we have written about:
