Mold-Making in March . . . Madness!

A perfectly good basketball — cut in half — is not a pleasant sight for kids to see when they are first learning about an art project. The class began with a barrage of questions along the lines of, “Why did you do that?” and then long outbursts of “Noooo!” accompanied by sad faces.

As I pitched the project, I told the students they would be making their own cross-sectioned planets through mold-making. We discussed why a basketball was the ideal tool for making a perfectly round shape: it is rubbery, keeps its shape during the mold-making process, and when the plaster is dry you can easily pull the basketball away because it is so pliable. When they understood the reason for this “basketball severing,” their protests ended. Students got to work plastering the basketballs, which quickly morphed into half globes. They then created a bullseye formation to show the different layers of their planets, and used paper mache to color them.

As you can see, the students got very creative making landforms, lakes, trees and even volcanoes on the surfaces of their planets. On the last day, the planets were mounted for display. No one even remembered the project had started with basketballs.