If you looked out Greece and Rome, you would see, in many places, a sea of tile rooftops. It was the same in ancient time. So many of the buildings in ancient Greece and Rome, as today, had red tile roofs.
I wanted to include at least a little of this when we did Rome VBS, and I found the easiest way was just using red construction paper. It was simple, cheap...and not unreasonably time consuming, though it would take more time for a larger area. It was much easier than cutting up and painting paper cups or oatmeal cannisters...some of the other materials I had considered. And the matte texture of construction paper is actually close to the look of real roofing tiles.
Here is a picture of our small tile roof. I had meant for it to go on a
portion of slanted roof...but alas, it ended up getting put up straight
up and down. Still, it didn't turn out badly.
And below is a close up of how we made it...
To make the roof tiles I stapled red paper at a curve to black paper (12" x 18" for both, not 9" x 12"). If you stagger the paper you can keep going up to make more rows.
It actually would have been a little easier if I had made this more accurately, because most
ancient Roman tile roofs had a flat space between each curved tile, like these ancient Roman tiles below....
So an ancient tile roof would have looked a little more like this....
Shared on