Interior Design Homeschool Unit

I don't know why this looks so blurry. But it will be better when you click to enlarge it.

What a year it has been! It has gone both fast and slow, as every year does. Everyone looks surprisingly young in the pictures a whole year ago. And now we're living in a different house than we were when the school year started! That move is actually the reason we thought of doing this unit on Interior Design in the first place. We knew we'd be moving in September (halfway through this unit, in fact) and we thought it might be nice to have some knowledge that could help us as we rearranged rooms and chose new furniture and so forth.

My pinterest board for this unit is here.

We watched some of the episodes from this cool Netflix show, The World's Most Extraordinary Homes.

Here are some of the other things we did:

We learned about design principles including the Golden Ratio and the Rule of Thirds. We made these visual representations of the Fibonacci Sequence.

Sam taught the kids about one- and two-point perspective for drawing interiors and exteriors.

 

We went on a field trip to IKEA to look at all the cute little display rooms. You can see lots of design principles in action there!

(Ziggy had to hug some doggies, of course)

We learned about color. We practiced mixing paint (primary and secondary colors) and making tints and shades of each color.

We also made color schemes with paint swatches (this is Junie's, featuring many pigs).

Teddy's color scheme

We learned about fabrics and textiles. I had a whole semester-long class on textiles in college! So I had lots of knowledge to share. :) We learned some differences between knits and wovens and made these weavings to talk about warp and weft.

Some related videos we liked:

• How cotton is made into fabric https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHgNoSYlhYs
• Silk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqFm_7KyfHI
• Velvet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjmXWWsEszw
• Fibers to fabrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qRhHKi8Pg8

We made to-scale diagrams of the children's rooms in the new house, along with scaled pieces of their furniture. Then they tried out different arrangements and chose their favorites. (This was a VERY USEFUL activity and saved us lots of time and effort moving actual furniture! Sam and I have often done this in our houses over the years, but we've never included the children in it, and it was fun for them, I think.) 

Of course, you can make these floor plans yourself on graph paper, and measure your own furniture to get custom sizes. That's what we've always done. But this time I bought a couple things that I thought it might save us time. It was nice to have the beds, etc., already drawn to scale, and ready to just punch out and use:

Furniture templates and architectural shape stencils

Room and furniture layout kit

You can also use this idea when making and measuring for floor plans:

Your body can be used as a measuring tool when you don't have a measuring tape conveniently with you. Although it's a nonstandard unit of measurement, it's conveniently with you all the time. It might also help you remember the measurements, because you have to use parts of your body instead of inches, feet and yards. Below are examples of how various body parts are used for measuring. 

foot: It probably goes without saying that the unit foot was based on the length of a man’s foot. 

span: Stretch out your hand so that the tip of your thumb is as far away as possible from the tip of your pinky. That distance is called a “span,” which for most people is almost exactly half a cubit. 

handbreadth: The width of your four fingers where they meet the palm—usually about 4 inches—is a handbreadth or sometimes just a “hand.” The height of horses is usually expressed in hands. 

digit: The width of a finger, which tends to be about 2cm (about 13/16 of an inch). 

thumb: The width of a thumb, which was later used as the basis for the inch 

Your assignment:  Go home and measure your bedroom.  However DO NOT use a ruler, use your foot.  On the back of this paper draw a scale diagram of your bedroom be sure to include and identify the following:  Length, Width, Windows, Door, Closet (see example below) Extra Credit:  Calculate the area of your room in “Square Sneaker” units.

I…actually have no idea what Goldie has drawn here. It does not appear to be any actual furniture.

I found a bunch of other good ideas for an Interior Design Unit for older students on this post. For example, I thought this sounded fun, and if we do this unit again, I'd assign this to an older child:

Create a Design Portfolio

Each week, [my daughter] had to create a design plan in a portfolio notebook. (I purchased one that had 11" x 14" sheets so that she could sketch her designs on a separate sheet of art paper and then glue them into the notebook. This gave her the freedom to make a mistake without ruining the entire portfolio.)

Acting as a potential client, every Monday, I "hired" her to design a particular room in my house featuring a specific design aesthetic/mood, certain color schemes, and/or furniture features. (I even petitioned some blog readers for help in coming up with unique requests.) For instance:

"I'd like you to design a French Country style dining room. I prefer grey and purple hues. My great aunt gave me this beautiful pie cupboard that I'd like you to incorporate into the design. I do a lot of entertaining, so the table needs to seat a crowd. There's not a lot of natural light in that area of my house, but I'd like it to feel bright." 

Other times I just gave her a few keywords for inspiration.

Multi-purpose family room: mix of fabrics, pool table, western, storage space, no checkered prints 

With those parameters in mind, she created a 3-page plan for her proposal. Each proposal consisted of:

a planning page with paint chips, fabric swatches, and notes

a colored sketch of the completed room

an aerial layout of the room plotted on graph paper

Solar System Celebration

It felt like the end of this school year deserved a good celebration! But I also didn't want to do anything that took too much preparation…prep time being rather a scarce resource around here. So we didn't do anything very fancy. Still, we had a fun time!

One activity we did was building Robot Arms like the one on the International Space Station. (Shown in this video, for example.) The children did this in teams, and there were moments of frustration…but they worked through them.

The parameters we used for this activity are found here (these Design Squad activities are always fun). The goal was to build a robot arm that could lift up a paper cup.

They did it!

The children enjoyed paper marbling so much during our Marbled Jupiter activity that they really wanted to do it again. This time we had three different color schemes to make Jupiter, Saturn, and Earth. (Instructions are here.)

It was definitely a more committed craft project than I'd attempt on a regular day—but this was a celebration day, so…I guess it was worth it. :)

When I found this "Build a cardboard rover" activity I knew we had to try it for the sake of our Rover-loving Teddy. I don't know what it was, but when we learned about the Mars Rovers, he just fell in love. He plays that he is a Rover, and he says he wants to go to Mars and take care of the Rovers when he grows up. He especially loves Curiosity, and still asks me almost daily if Curiosity is still working and going around up on Mars! (So far, the answer is yes!) We are pretty excited to watch the launch of the new Mars Rover in July.

The instructions for this "cardboard rover" are here. (Basically, it's just a rubber-band-powered car, with square "all-terrain" wheels.) It's really simple to make…though somehow walking several children through a project manages to be quite an involved process no matter how simple it is…sigh. Once we had our Rovers assembled they really liked iterating on ways to make them go faster or longer. Hard surfaces worked best!

Daisy made the cutest little mini robot arm to go on her Rover. It was jointed and moved just like our big robot arms!

Here's the robot arm in action!

We made these simple paper rockets, found here at Rising Wonder.

I had the bigger kids help me make these little "jet-packs," just for fun, for the little boys. (We didn't have enough 2-liter bottles for everyone, and we knew the little boys would have the most fun playing with them.) I don't even know where the original idea came from; these were everywhere when I searched "space party ideas." I didn't find written instructions but just looked at a picture and figured it out. Basically, you spray paint two two-liter bottles silver, duct tape them together, glue on some felt "flames," and attach straps like a backpack. Easy. The girls really loved helping spray paint and glue, and then presenting the "surprise" to Ziggy and Teddy with great fanfare!

I found a 9-pack of these planet necklaces for $12 on Amazon, so I ordered them and let the children divide them among themselves. They are really pretty!

I also thought it would be a really fun activity to make planet bracelets like this one. I ended up just ordering a couple because I didn't want to go to the craft store for beads during quarantine. But I still think it would be great to make your own—search for beads to represent each planet, and then string them together on bracelet elastic. Part of the fun is that it just looks like a cute bead bracelet—but YOU would know that it represents our Solar System. Fun!

Picture of the Solar System Goldie drew (I wish you could see all the little details)

 

Teddy's meticulous solar system. Note Jupiter's Great Red Spot, Saturn's hexagonal storm, and the tiny Mars Rovers (Curiosity and Opportunity) on Mars!

These various activities took us ALL DAY and were actually a lot more work than I was anticipating, interspersed with nursing Gussie and trying to keep the house from falling apart! But on the upside, it did really feel like a Day Of Fun! 

After we got all the activities cleaned up, we ended by making mini pizzas for dinner—Jupiter pizzas, of course!

It was actually pretty hard to keep a Jupiter-ish striped-cloud look after the pizza was cooked. Our nice lines of cheese all melted together! Luckily…they tasted great anyway. :)

And I had ordered this astronaut ice cream for dessert!