By Cecilia Cunningham-dePedro

 LREI- These past few weeks, DT4’s class has been studying Immigration from the early 1900’s.  Sometimes, we were acting as the immigrants. One of the things we learned was that every immigrant had a chance to bring something to America from their home country. That could be photographs, clothing, soap and more. But the immigrants had to carry those objects by a trunk. So in shop we made trunks.

First we had to pick the size of our trunks. Some people, depending on what they wanted to bring, made big trunks. I made a small trunk because I am bringing my needle and thread from Ireland. The first thing we did was measure. Our pieces of wood had to be smaller than 15 inches.

After that we took what we had made so far and nailed the pieces of wood together. Some of us sanded the wood to make it look old- fashioned/older. Sanding the wood also makes it smoother and less likely to get splinters.

We then attached locks and handles to make the trunk easy to carry. Handle examples would be using leather and nailing mini nails into the top of the wood, using brass handles already made, or making your own handle. Some examples of locks would be, a small latch, an inch iron brass lock, or personalizing a latch.

We also were allowed to use ‘stain’ which makes the trunks look like oak wood or maple. The common trees that grow where your home country is, you might want to make your wood look like the tree.