Hurray for Hollywood... and Big Oil!

The twins had their big 4th grade California history projects due on Friday (their birthday!).  They each had to do a 3D project and stand up to present it.  Their little minds were racing with ideas.  Here is what they came up with:

Dylan wanted to do his about oil discovered on the coast of California after he saw an old picture from the '20s with oil derricks all over the the beach like a forest.  (I think he really just wanted to build the derricks.)

He used tissue paper and glitter to make the water.  I loved how he folded the paper to make the waves.  Then he spread out a layer of glue and poured on the sand for a beach.

He figured out how to build oil derricks with skewers and popsicle sticks.  I had to help him though, after her burned his fingers on the glue gun.

He added a great work truck, and we found the fence at WalMart.

 He added a sign...
And an oil barrel he found in my craft supplies.

The best part, of course, is the oil spewing from the tops.  We found a party chandelier at the party store with the black mylar sparkly sprays on it for $3, and took it apart to make the oil spewing from the top. What luck!

I think Dylan struck oil with this project.

Derek made it big with his Hollywood drive-in.

He made the Hollywood hills out of crumpled newspaper and moss.  My mom used her Cricut to cut out the letters for him which he glued on.  We just printed a picture of the old drive-in sign on the internet and stamped on the king King title.  The hardest part was digging through our huge collection of hundreds of hot wheels for find the older models, but the brothers loved helping with this part.  Now there are cars all over my house.

 I thought it looked great!

But this wasn't good enough.  Derek had grander visions of Hollywood.  His first idea, and it was a great one, was to make the movie screen a portable DVD player playing a real old movie.  But I had to nix that idea, because I was afraid it would get stolen.

So this is what we came up with instead:

Derek used wood blocks to build the screen.  We found a great picture of the old B&W King Kong movie.  He glued that to the front, and black paper in the back, with a little LED light in between.  How cool is that?

  They both did a great job!  Those projects were so fun to do (except for the burned fingers).  Now that is my kind of homework!

Hurray for Hollywood...and big oil!