Making a Yurt

Sunday night after all the birthday festivities, Becca built a yurt for a school project. They are studying how and why buildings stand up. Her assignment was to build an interesting structure from somewhere in the world. Due to the international nature of her school, they really encourage the kids to think about and appreciate many other cultures. Then she needed to write about who used it, what materials were used and why they used these things. We found several great websites to aid in her research. After reading this one, she decided that she would build a yurt, a type of portable house found Mongolia. Kind of fun since sometime in our stay in China we might actually see one! We debated about how would be the best way to build it. She used chopsticks for the support beams (because after all, we are in China, what else would we use?) and some fabric a friend gave us for the covering. Unfortunately, we had no wool to give it that authentic look. :-)

I think she did an amazing job (really amazing because she did it all.... I just performed slight assists with the glue gun). Here is her finished masterpiece:

And then a picture of an actual yurt: