Totem Poles

Last week, our first unit with the following central idea came to an end: 

our beliefs and values help impact the choices we make. 

As a way to explore and express our own beliefs and values, 

we worked on a project of designing 3D art which is inspired by totem poles!

Totem poles are an important part of the culture of First Nation people on the Western coast of North America. Totem poles serve many purposes such as representing stories or important events as well as celebrating cultural beliefs. 

In this project, we first came up with various qualities that we value. 

For example, some of us chose honesty, wisdom and bravery as qualities which are important to us. 

We then thought of animals which we believe to represent such qualities.

Next, we used Lego blocks to construct rectangular prisms. 

Then, we used these 3D shapes to create nets for each animal to put on our totem poles. This was a challenging process since we needed to picture how 2D shapes make up the sides of a 3D shape!

Once our nets were completed, we drew our chosen animals from various perspectives. 

It was important to think about how different shapes would look like when they were seen from the front, top, left, right, and behind. 

Here are some of the finished totem poles!

See you next week :)