So my nine year old had to do a biome project for school and he wanted to do the desert for whatever reason and he asked me for help. He turned it in last week, it was due today, but we got it done early so he doesn’t have a grade yet, but I think he’ll easily get an A+ on the project.

Originally he wanted to put a pile of sand in the box, not gluing it down or anything, I got him to understand that it wouldn’t be a good idea to do that.

For some reason I thought doing papercraft would be a cool idea, then I started doing it and realized just how much work it is.

 

I ended up using sandpaper for the bottom and crinkling it up to sort of make dunes. Here’s the whole thing, yes we opted to have the box open to show more.

 

Here’s a couple other views:

I scaled down a lot of the papercraft animals, but some just couldn’t be scaled down too much as they were just to intricate to build them that way. So it’s not exactly to scale, but it is a kids school project so scale isn’t really the idea, it’s more to show what’s in the desert and about the desert.

Here’s our tarantula and some grass and rocks and a snake.

 

A couple bunnies, a kangaroo rat and the other side of the snake above:

 

Here’s kind of the full scene, you’d never see these all together in the wild…

 

Wolf, scorpion, camel and another rock

The big cactus:

 

Scorpion, rat, rocks and more grass:

 

Big snake, big rock, lizard, and another scorpion:

 

I couldn’t find a papercraft hawk no matter where I looked, so I found a blackbird and painted him brown in a photo editor program. Made two of those and hung them to fly around:

It was fun…