Apple trees and apple picking, student art display, children's drawing class, 9/25/18

We grew a little apple orchard in art class. It was a tricky experiment to figure out just how to do these. At one point a child claimed to prefer drawing much more than 'craft'. All aspects are necessary though. Figuring out the engineering for making such structures happen is an important skill to develop. Also, to learn to deal with frustration until one makes a breakthrough of solving the problem. There are many ways to make paper model trees. We only tried one way. We ended up having to create different solutions to getting one tree to stay upright because it was made of thin paper instead of card stock.

These trees work like the slotted house of cards. We cut two identical tree shapes from card stock. Find the vertical midpoint on each. Cut a straight line up the middle to that point on one tree. Cut straight down through the midline to the midpoint on the other tree. Slot them together. You might be lucky and have them stand on their own. We made stabilizer stands for them.

Those plans were not well worked out in my head. Make an interlocking low box/frame/fence using 4 strips of card stock and the same slit/cut method. The tree trunk will join with the fence in this same manner but across the middles of each strip. This is where all measuring gets tricky and I don't have diagrams to show you. Until I do, you might have to think of this as a puzzle to solve! Solutions and diagrams etc welcome,