Turns out you can do a lot more with plastic bottles than just recycle them – like create representations of famous people from Massachusetts.

Using bottles, foam balls, and various crafting materials, the third graders of Minot Forest Elementary school created likenesses of everyone from Clara Barton to Edgar Allan Poe to Mark Whalberg. They also wrote small reports on their chosen people’s lives, so parents and teachers could go around the cafeteria in which the projects were presented, and ask each student about his or her person.

Teacher Julie Cardoso said the children had been working on the projects for four weeks. Not only were they able to be creative, she said, but they also got to learn how to write the equivalent of reports and essays.

“They have a title page, they have three paragraphs … they need to have a bibliography,” Cardoso said. “They had to have a book and a website [as sources].”

In writing the reports, Cardoso said, the kids also learned about plagiarism, and wrote the reports based on questions that wouldn’t allow them to simply rewrite the books and websites they used.

“We set the questions up as a way to write their essays,” Cardoso said. “I tell them, ‘What you just did, as an 8-year-old in third grade … you’ll be doing it that way through college.’”

Though the kids became experts on their chosen people, Cardoso said she suspects they had the most fun creating the bottle likenesses.

“They came out dynamite,” Cardoso said.