One of the biggest dilemmas an art teacher faces is what to do with the kids that finish a project while everyone else isn’t quite done yet. The easiest thing to have is some sort of independent project that can be explained in just a few steps and is easy to work on without a lot of further instruction. So when my sixth graders were finishing up their radial name designs, I had them start this skyscraper project. I demonstrated the basics of adding floors to their buildings and gave them the option of making their building 2-D or 3-D, then I let them go to it while I helped everyone else finish up their name design!
When everyone had moved on to the skyscraper and spent a few days on it, we added lobbies, cut the buildings off on whatever floor they finished on and added backgrounds. Now the hallways near the office are lined with a city’s worth of unique buildings!