ELEMENTARY

Our large-scale collaborative town. Many students used donut boxes as a starting point for their constructions. 

Avigail Shimshoni

Through designing and making, together or side by side, I hope that my students listen and feel heard, learn from one another, and reach places they never imagined.

I might ask students how they would redesign their school and its community neighborhood and transform them into youth-friendly places. Sometimes, I start a program with a question simply to get students quickly engaged in the design.

My favorite three strategies, which I’ve used in almost every program, are Imagine First, Catch Them by Surprise, and Get Them Moving.

We begin by imagining and doing—creating hands-on from the start of the very first day. I ask students to lead the journey of designing, trusting what they already know and their gut feelings. Once they are personally engaged, I gather students for short ten- to fifteen-minute sessions for sharing and filling in any concepts as needed. I provide students with opportunities to research and refer to related examples throughout the following sessions.

Inspired by a fourth-grade unit on Native Americans, students envisioned how they would build shelters using natural materials.

The unexpected keeps us on our toes and can be a lot of fun. It makes us slow down and think, and it helps us to shake off any preconceived notions we might have. I surprise students in simple ways: rearranging the tables or not using them at all, introducing materials students probably hadn’t used before for model-making, and asking them to discover connections between familiar concepts or everyday objects that are seemingly unrelated.

Moving our bodies loosens up the cells in our brain. It also opens more opportunities for students to interact. I get students away from the desks and active. I encourage movement in informal ways, such as going over to see what other students are creating or stepping back to look at their work from different angles. I also try to connect movement to the content or concepts I want students to explore.

My lesson Imagine This Town! is a great example of the three-strategy approach. I challenged students to imagine a town and collaborate to build a large-scale physical model (about 9 x 9') of the town they envisioned. Throughout this activity, students reflected on the towns they live in and learned about some architecture, town-planning concepts, and challenges town planners and architects often face. Students eventually shared their work with planners from our town hall, located across the street from our school.

On the first day, I greeted students with a large cloth spread on the floor with one water bottle placed in the center. As we sat on the cloth around the bottle, I asked them, “Why do you think we are beginning an architecture lesson with one water bottle?” Soon after, I gave them tape, scissors, and a bundle of empty water bottles to experiment with constructing models.

Opening the program this way, I applied all three strategies described above. Students may have had a hunch that the program would in some way be about town planning, as the title suggests, but they were caught by surprise by the opening setting and my question. By sitting on the floor, I also gave a subtle message that, in this program, we would be constructing away from our desks. And I had students imagining and building hands-on during the very first day.

Throughout the process of constructing models and laying out and creating the town, I encouraged students to look at their projects from different angles. Bending down or even lying on their stomachs, they could better envision what streets and buildings might look like from eye level. Standing on a step or a chair, they could catch a bird’s-eye view and see the street layout and how it all came together.

The ARchiTecture approach and strategies can be applied to create a whole or partial lesson or program, and it can be adapted for all ages.

Avigail Shimshoni is an art teacher who lives in Natick, Massachusetts. ashimsho@lesley.edu
Imagine This Town!