Our second stop in Project: Around the World was Albania. Albania is a small country located in Eastern Europe, just east of the heel of the boot that is Italy. (See it on a map here.) It was a little bit difficult to narrow down our inspiration. Albania is a beautiful country and I found many examples of beautiful buildings and traditional folk costumes. In the end, we stumbled across the town of Tirana. Tirana was completely downtrodden until mayor Edi Rama decided to brighten the spirits of the citizens with paint. Tirana is now completely transformed and is full of the most fun and beautiful brightly colored buildings. (You can see before and after examples at this link from TEDx.) For our art project inspired by Albania, we took a few simple supplies and made our own version of the colorful buildings of Tirana.
Disclosure: This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. Please see my disclosure for more details.
Supplies Needed:
White paper
Pencil
Oil pastels (crayons or markers will also work)
Before designing our buildings, we folded each piece of paper in half. Make a sharp crease to help the buildings stand up.
Next, we used our pencils to add our doors and our windows. We outlined these with black oil pastel to help them stand out. Most of the buildings we was in the pictures were larger apartment buildings, so we tried duplicating this on our buildings.
After we were satisfied with our basic buildings, we started adding the bright colors. You can be inspired by the pictures of Tirana or dream up your own design. Both girls decided to add a little big of nature to their buildings with clouds, trees, and flowers. Once we finished, we refolded the paper and stood our buildings up. We had our own mini version of the colorful buildings in Tirana.
Our virtual trip to Albania was short, but fun. I won’t have a separate book post this time since I was unable to find any books about Albania. I did find one folk story in the the book, Magic Hoofbeats: Fantastic Horse Tales retold by Josepha Sherman. If you know of any books about Albania, please let me know in the comment section. Otherwise, online you can browse through Lonely Planet’s guide to Albania for pictures and information about places you can visit.
Thanks for traveling along on our virtual trip around the world!
Click the logo below to find all of our Project: Around the World posts.
The following two tabs change content below.
Terri is a writer and mom of two elementary-aged girls. She has a passion for learning and is always looking for ways to make learning fun. You can find her here writing about fun learning activities, art, craft, and family fun ideas.
Latest posts by Terri Thompson (see all)
- Cardboard Tube Turkey Craft - October 30, 2023
- Simple and Fun Shape Crafts for Toddlers - October 25, 2023
- Thanksgiving Math Activities for Kids - November 10, 2022