Personality Totem

I'm teaching in French Immersion program for grade 4's -5's -6's and 7's

This project falls mostly under art, but it crosses subjects with Social Studies, ADST and Career as well. The great part is that through a specific theme, we tied it all together and made a very meaningful project allowing quite some introspection as well. On top of it, the students ended up with a token/ object reflecting their personality.

I bought the two books in picture "Learning by Designing" (by Jim Gilbert ad Karin Clark) many years ago. I strongly recommend them.

However there are many tutorials on how to draw native art available online. If you can make it relevant to your local indigenous nation, it is even better.

Outside of that, you need paper, color pencils, scissors, glue computers for the TinkerCad part and time (lots of it)

• To introduce the concept of indigenous art we started with coloring a totem pole using a coloring page that I downloaded from internet. You can find many free of rights on google. Try to make it relevant to your local first nations if you know their particular style.

• Totem poles have that particularity of cumulating several symbols in one work of art that tells a story. Villages or some families have their own totem poles and it tells the viewer about the place or person they are going to visit.

• Then using the book I mentioned in the resources we learned about traditional particular shapes of the west coast art including:
• "Ovoids"
• "U / N shapes"
• "S shapes"

and how and where to place them in the art project.

• The book also increases the level of difficulty. Starting with how to draw an "eagle head" then a "wolf head" and finally with the "human head". We have been working on those 4 elements over the course of a few weeks as art projects.

As a final step of the conventional art component of that project we did cut out the 3 creative designs (eagle head, wolf head and human head) as well as the introductory totem coloring sheet.

By taking those different and individual art project and organizing them together on a poster we could identify a growth in the skills and technicity of the various shapes.

Now the project becomes more personal. This part of the project will need your student to reflect on themselves and their own skills and abilities and in a nutshell who they are.

Our school uses what we call "Successful Learner Traits" but you can find many "animal personality traits" online. A quick search lead me to the following pages:

16 personality animal types

learner profile with animals

facilitators animal personalities

After providing the animal personality profiles you judged as the most relevant, have your students to reflect on themselves and ask them to choose 3.

• 1 for how they behave toward their work / assignment.
• 1 for how they behave towards friends.
• 1 for how they behave with family.

you can use the work page below as well. (there is one in French and one in English)

As you discovered through the art journey, there are some shapes specific to native art that can be tricky to get in TinkerCad.

Shape Generator > "extrusion" is a great shape to help you get the U / N shapes, teeth, and even the ovoid's.

To create the ovoid in picture I used 2 round roof and then "stamped" them with a "negative sphere hole box" to round the edges. You can also just download it here below.

you can also see how to make a "stamping" in TinkerCad following this link:

"stamping" a shape in TinkerCad

Finally, I did also set the backing of the totem pole. The sculpted elements all sit on the same backing. I recommend using hexagonal shape to guaranty a flat surface at the back.

Reason of doing so is that it will allow to lay down your totem poles to print. As printing upward will give a better resolution to your projects.

Using their reflection pages and the skills acquired through the art project, my students had to design 4 objects.

• 1 indigenous art style human head: this object had to have markers representing themselves. (mine has the beard, moustache and blue eyes)
• the 3 others are each animal they identified as their personality animal trait in step3. (note symbolism is important, like my owl has both sun and moon, my beaver has a twig on it's belly or my dog inspired by the wolf head has hearts in his eyes...)
• Students also had to save a picture of each element. (use the send to option and download button).

Before jumping head first in the TC designing, students might want to sketch their totem elements on paper first.

I suggest:

• You give a size limitation to avoid having oversized projects. (I gave to my students a limit of 20mm high by 30 width/length being a little flexible specially for birds objects.
• You provide the backing element as mentioned in step 4.
• Before students export their objects in STL, they need to make sure their creation is centered on the back piece otherwise assembling and aligning their totem pole will be tricky.

once the student designed each element, they need to export them separately as an STL.

Why? Because TinkerCad has a limit of importation fixed at 25MB at a time. Importing 4 small elements and assembling them as 1 in a new project is easier and lighter for your printer than having one massive file.

Now it is time to "start a new design" and assemble the totem pole.

Students have to "import" their 4 STL and stack them all.

As they are at the starter / thinker / personality owner, I asked my student to put the human head representing themselves at the bottom.

The order of the other personality trait is not restricted HOWEVER I asked the students to organize them in a way that is significant for them and be able to explain.

Example: For mine the dog is at the top because despite he represents kindness (in our successful learner trait) dogs are also guardians. So, I liked the idea that one of my personality hold watch on the others...

Finally, before exporting their final totem files, I asked the students to lay their totems down on their back.

(as most of the details are oriented forward, printing from the back to the front increase greatly the resolution of the details.)

Then, they exported their STL of the full totem and sent it to me as well as a picture of it.

As a final step over the entire project, I asked the students to make a poster.

They titled it: "My Personality Totem"

• I wanted them to put a picture of each separate elements and with arrows to point at features that made their element personal. (like I pointed at my beard or blue eyes...)

• On each poster we also added a picture of the full totem. For this one, I asked them to point out what is the personality trait linked to the element and what aspect of their personality it represent (toward work, friendship or family)

• Finally, I asked the student to write just 2 or 3 phrase to say what they particularly like about their project and how it makes it unique.

The last step for me was to print all the totems.

Each of the students received his/ her own totem pole as a token of their personality like a "my personality as an object".

I'm very proud of their work as this project ended up being quite a journey but so much worth it.