Each student wrote a story about something in their lives, which they could use to create a totem pole. Using the green pepper as a model simplified the concepts. The totem pole project encouraged students to write a story about a special event in their lives and introduced students to the Indian plank house building project. Each student later turned the story into a three-dimensional totem pole figure. The class was exciting and the children were enthusiastic about the project, making the architecture concepts easy to explain.
Students design and build their own totem poles.
Concentrate the totem pole drawings on their story ideas. Construct totem poles. Having the children draw pictures of their special event on index cards to create the totem poles helped them learn about writing, using symbols, and symmetry. This was a great exercise for discovering the creative abilities of the students. The teaching team was not certain that the totem pole project would work, but by making slits in the index cards and stacking them one on top of the other, it did.