If you love working with your hands on miniature things, try these ideas for building a diorama of a town or city. Great hands-on history, social studies or art project!
Dioramas are attention grabbers. Who can resist the fun of seeing things in miniature? Build a diorama of your hometown, a famous city, or a historical place.
Which city?
What is your hometown like? A big city? A small country town? A suburb of a city? Or do you live in the country away from town? Dream up a new place and build it yourself out of poster or tag board, construction paper, scissors and glue.
What goes in it?
Your town can have buildings—stores, shops, malls, gas stations, fast food drive-ins, restaurants and hotels. How about a pet shop, a clothing store, churches, a post office, Wal-Mart, drugstore, a hospital, fire station, ice cream parlor or a coffee shop? Of course, you will want houses and apartments, condos, trailer houses, maybe a nursing home.
A town needs roads so use a sheet of poster board or an old white sheet to draw the town square, streets, highways, an airport with an airplane or two, a lake with a park, some camping tents, boats, a marina and some fishermen. If you want something sturdier than paper, try using a sheet of plywood for your town and keep it in the garage where you can stand it up when not in use and lay it down to play. One for indoors could be made from an old bed sheet.
What about names?
Name your town, your streets and add signs to street corners, stores and public buildings. Use wooden toothpicks as sign poles and fix them to stand up with a small ball of modeling clay or Playdough™. Sculpey Clay™ is good for making the little extra miniatures that make your town look real. For example, make a bakery and in the window place a tiny cake, a tray of doughnuts, and some loaves of French bread. Snip some silk plants to make trees and flowers for lawns or a Wal-Mart garden department display. Hot Wheels™ make great traffic for your streets—cars and trucks tiny enough to put on your roads.
Backgrounds:
Don't forget to paint a background for your tiny town. Are there mountains? Draw or build those. Hills? A forest? The ocean? A background makes your model town realistic looking. Does a train run through it? How about water? A lake, river, a water tower, windmills? Details make a diorama fascinating.
Options to consider:
Maybe your town is an American town. Maybe your town is one you would like to study or have studied in school. A famous city, like London or Paris, could be built if you had the time and the ability to copy some of the landmarks and architecture. Of course, you couldn’t put everything in, but you could choose some dominant structures and typical styles of housing.
You might want to consider making your diorama a town from the pages of history. What did Glenpool, Oklahoma look like after oil was discovered there in 1905? Making a diorama of an existing town in a different era, is a fascinating hands-on way to learn history.
One option is to build a "type" of town, say, an Indian village with tepees and campfires, an Island village with thatched roofed huts, an Indian Pueblo, a Mexican Villa with stuccoed houses and open markets, an Alaskan village with igloos and sled dogs, a western ghost town, a middle Eastern town with flat roofs and olive trees, or a city with skyscrapers.
Displaying your Showpiece:
In any case, give much attention to detail and your diorama town will be a showpiece. Find some public place where your model town can be displayed, (library, school, nursing home, etc.) especially if it is of your home town. Many citizens will enjoy seeing their town and your view of it.
