The Old Town Project, The Source

There is a pinterest group board called Give me 5. On it, Kierna Corr of Learning for Life and I but mostly Kierna, have been collecting images and ideas from around the world. While each Fall at our school, the 4- and 5-year olds pursue projects about mapping and connecting with the neighborhood around us each year, there were two pins that served as inspiration for the cardboard houses of our Old Town project and these changed the course of what we usually present.

The first was the Sophia Preschool's cardboard box canvases. The second was from Miriam Paternoster's blog and features a bright Klee-looking painting of a set of buildings on a page of a book (perhaps a Dicken's book which makes it all the better). Thank you, thank you, thank you all.

Displaying Old Town Takoma

The process began with a field trip and progressed in short order (around 4 weeks) to finished buildings. The final step which is part of our look twice approach is to display the work along with child-friendly documentation of the process.

Displaying these ended up being the biggest challenge in the end. I originally envisioned attaching them to the wall with lots of tape. With the first building, it became immediately evident that this method would not work. I specifically chose one of the heavier boxes to test out. The weight along with the inconsistent surface of the painted and then glued box would not connect the tape to the similarly inconsistent surface of the wall.

So I decided to glue the houses onto large sheets of construction paper and then mount these in sections to the wall. Success! The final touch was the documentation. I lined the space below the street with photographs of the field trip and building construction process and these images below of mounting the exhibit!

The Building of Old Town Takoma

We had  A LOT of donated boxes of every shape and size gathered just one day after sending out a request for them.

The children began the building process with a sanding session. They needed to rough up the gloss of the printing so that the tempera paint would hold. Then they applied two coats of tempera. A glue wash over the entire box held the doors and windows cut from home and architectural magazines. The final stage was to cut the corners or tops off the left-over boxes to make the roofs, although one builder wanted a curved roof and for that we cut up an oatmeal box. These cuts were made by me. The roofs were attached to the buildings with tape by the children.

The final step in the construction portion was to glue shingle pieces on to the roofs.

Tip of the day: I used our giant IKEA recycled shopping bag to store the works in progress. This allowed us to move the collection from room to room as the children moved through the space.