Reading Fair Project

Eve's school had a reading fair this week. I went to her classroom on Tuesday to see all of the awesome projects. These kids are creative. I do hate that you can tell the difference between the projects that parents helped with and the ones without helpful parents.

The project consisted of the following:

Read a teacher approved book

Take an accelerated reader quiz on the book

Make a poster that follows several criteria 

Answer questions to judges about project

Have project judged

Have parents visit and see the projects

This project started at the beginning of October and we are finally finished. She has worked hard on her project but she is happy that it is finally over. She won an award in her class for most creative and appealing display. She was so proud of herself!

The book she chose to read was Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. She has read another book in this series and was excited to read more about the Ingalls family. The only downside to this book is that it is hard to be creative with it. You can't choose flashy colors or fancy fonts because that is not something that would be associated with the 1860's. So, we thought a button necklace and a wagon would be era appropriate.

First, to make the button necklace Eve used fishing wire and buttons from grandma. My mom is a sewer and has a huge container of buttons. She sat and stringed them on while I straightened the letters on her poster.

As for the letters, we thought we could do fun prints that people from that time frame might use for dresses, home decor, or quilts. We went to Hobby Lobby and got lucky that the scrapbook paper was 50% off. I bought the 8 1/2 x 11 size. I think we bought 6 different sheets. My original plan was to print the letters on the back of the papers as a mirror image and then cut them out but my printer and the program I was using wouldn't do mirror image. After some thought we decided to use a cutter that we have at work in the teachers lounge. The letters are a nice plain font and 4" in size. Luckily I bought a pad of 6x6 scrapbook paper too because we ran out quickly with those size letters. We even cut out enough letters to do "Laura Ingalls Wilder" but it wouldn't fit on our poster board.

The wagon was built from the following: wooden coffee stir sticks, copper wire, wagon wheels, and burlap ribbon. The wagon wheels came from the doll house section of Hobby Lobby. Dad built the wagon with the hot glue gun and I added the burlap ribbon. Eve printed out the cover of the book and then cut out Laura and Mary to glue on the wagon. We then glued the wagon to the board.

Our inspiration

Because I bought a black board (it was on clearance at Meijer) we chose to write the titles of our sections (plot, mood, etc.) in white crayon, hoping it would look like chalk. I didn't want to use regular chalk because it would smear. I think it turned out pretty close to a chalk look. 

Typed parts that described her book were printed on white paper and then glued to different 6x6 scrapbook papers (which we also bought at Hobby Lobby). They were already cut so we didn't have to do anything to them, just glue them down and add the white typed paper.

Since the authors name wouldn't fit on the board, Eve wanted to follow the same theme as above. She typed the authors name and then printed it. We cut some scrapbook paper smaller and glued the white pages to it.

Overall her project looks basic and simple but that is what we thought of when we thought about Little House. Not much flashy stuff happened then :)