Project-based Homeschooling: Paper Dinosaurs + 1

If you read my mid-year update, you might remember how I wondered why my eight-year-old didn’t build as much as he usually does last fall. Now I think that is because he was in a pottery class and otherwise occupied with things that satisfied his need to build. Once that class ended, and the holidays came, his building instinct came back. And it started with paper dinosaurs.

I am notorious for buying lots of cheap books at library book sales. One of my boys saw this book and wanted me to buy it, but it stayed un-opened on our shelf for a long time. This doesn’t make me want to “declutter.” I am a hoarder of books and educational materials because I know that any day, my boys might find something interesting that they didn’t find interesting the day before. I will only get rid of this kind of “clutter” once they are way too old for the items. Doing this has yielded some good surprises, such as these paper dinosaurs.

Over the holidays, my eight-year-old found the book, and he thought he might make one of the paper dinosaurs. I showed him how to do the first one, which was the easiest one in the book. The dinosaurs near the back of the book were NOT easy to make, and I didn’t have the patience for those. But my little builder did. For days, he obsessed about making these paper dinosaurs, and now we have a whole box full of them sitting on our floor with no place to put them. (This is clutter I would love dispense with, but since it still means a lot to my son, I don’t make him throw his creations away. A small price to pay for fostering creativity.)

I am always amazed to see how patient my son is when he’s trying to figure out how to make something. (He’s the same way with intricate Lego kits.) He will spend all day, and when I say all day, I mean all his free time during the day trying to finish whatever it is he puts his mind to. For days, he worked on these dinosaurs, and when he finally figured out how to make them without much trouble, and he amassed a good supply of them, he stopped making them.

+1 Project Element

But before he did that, he came up with one non-dinosaur paper creature of his own design. He simply tweaked one of the dinosaur designs to make a paper Jabba the Hut. If you read my mid-year report, you might also remember how I said his greatest interest last fall was Star Wars, though it didn’t lead to building any models. I had hoped it would, and this paper Jabba was his first representation of his interest in Star Wars since the fall. (And he made several paper Jabbas in all.) I was really excited to see it since I had wondered if his interest in Star Wars would go deeper.

I didn’t do a very good job of getting the paper Jabbas’ tails in the photos, but they each have one.

Since then, he’s done more Star Wars projects, and I’ll fill you in on that in my next column, which is all about his Star Wars project.