Tunnel Books

The inspiration for the Tunnel Book lesson came from the following site: Pop Art Tunnel Books
I would love to do this lesson again as a tie in to Keith Haring, especially since his hometown is the nearby town of Kutztown, PA!

Over the summer, I did this lesson with my summer camp at Paint Some Pottery, and it turned out great.  Instead of Pop Art, we (My co-teacher and I) decided to keep it general, since we weren't sure how well the project would work with such different ages all together.  We focused on creating a scene.  We explained what a scene was We talked about background, foreground, and middle ground.  We also talked about characters and props.  We brainstormed ideas of where are scenes could take place. 

I decided to repeat this lesson with my Home School Group.  It was near the holidays when we started, so I thought it might be fun to create some Christmas or Winter Scenes.  I presented the lesson similar to how I presented it over the summer. We started talking about what a scene is.  Some students connected it to a scene in a movie or play, which I thought was great. We talked about what that scene would need--a place, people, and things (aka, a setting, characters, and props). I explained that our background would show the place or setting of where the scene was taking place.  I showed them my example, just so that they could understand that there would be multiple levels for their characters and props.  We brainstormed a list of places that our scenes could take place--Knoebels was a popular suggestion, as was a living room set up for Christmas. I told them they could choose anywhere they would like, and they started by drawing their backgrounds and coloring them in. Over the series of 4 weeks, they created the backgrounds, characters and props, along with the different level frames that they would need to create the finished piece. To finish, they glued a character or prop on the background with little folded pieces of paper to raise them up, then they folded two side papers accordion style.  They glued the background sheet to the back accordion, and then attached their next level frame on the next level of the accordion. They added their next character or prop and then repeated until their final and 3rd frame was in the front.