Kindergarten Teacher Daniella La Rosa and Architect Angela Woda from Beate Adfectus begin the journey with a very excited group of children.
SESSION 1: MARCH 29th
With so many professional architects in our Parent group this year, many children were already familiar with the concept of ‘design’ and had a working understanding of what architects do when they met our architect for the Eco-Cubby project, Angela Woda. Angela spent time sharing news about herself and getting to know the children in the first session. She shared the book Animal Houses and also shared some photographs of inspiring cubbies. They were inspired, and began drawing pictures of their “best cubbies” after the session. Teachers have created a designated Eco-Cubby workspace in the room so that children can draw, design and imagine throughout the day.
Caleb’s cubby design
SESSION 2: APRIL 5th
Our session today centred on talking about what we can ‘find’ within our environment to build a cubby with. We explored the idea of building structures using our bodies too, bending and stretching them to enclose and cover. We took our ideas outside and hunted around for useful building materials in the yard. The children gathered quite a creative collection of found things and set to work with blocks, hay bales, buckets, baskets and blankets to build a structure together.
When one of the walls fell down, Dante very cleverly reinforced the rebuilt wall with blocks to keep it standing. Once built, the children determined how many could fit inside it at the one time and decided that a high blanket as a roof gave them much more space.
Using our bodies to build a cubby
Gathering materials
SESSION 3: MAY 4th
Today the Eco-Cubby project work focused on ‘light’. Kerry (Kindergarten educator) and Angela prompted the children to consider how they would get light into their Cubby designs and talked about the difference between natural and artificial light.
Amy designed a cubby with very high windows so she could see the clouds and the sky through them. The windows have blinds on them so “if there is too much sun you can shut the blind” during sunny weather. Dante’s design included an opening roof and his “read and green windows are 3D glasses, so when you look out, you see the world in 3D”.
Amy’s long windows
Dante’s 3D windows
SESSION 4: MAY 11th - JUNE 10th
Brainstorming the concepts ‘seasons’ and ‘sustainability’ helped the children to consider the effects of weather and temperature on the way we live.
How do we live in summer?
What do we do and what do we need our buildings to do in summer that they don’t do in winter?
Angela (Architect) created a story about 'Sally Season' and 'Boris Building' to explain these ideas in a clever way. Ari explained his ideas for a Cubby that works well in all seasons: “You can slide down the roof to get out of it. It’s a slippery dip. The roof protects you from the sun. The roof extends down in the cold to protect you from the cold”.
Teachers have been working with children to extend their drawing and design work on paper into the three dimensional world. We have talked about standing our designs ‘up’ so that they aren’t just flat ideas and introduced construction work with boxes into the project.
Akira built a cubby out of recycled boxes which had a skylight that opens, windows and wheels so that it could be driven around, like a caravan. Anouk explored building with playdough and made a small scale house with windows and front and back door. Cubby building has also gone on apace outdoors, where children make different structures as part of their play on most days. A pile of boxes from a new desk delivery was put to good use outdoors as children recycled and reused them to create weird and wonderful play spaces.
Ari’s cubby with a slippery dip roof
Akira’s 3D cubby
SESSION 5: JULY 1st
Angela and many parents and friends joined us for a three hour workshop which centred on ‘the site’ today. We explored our yard with a different idea in mind:
What does it look like from a bird’s eye view?
Where are the buildings - where is the chook house?
What type of trees do we have and where are they?
We went on a nature walk in the yard and collected lots of samples of objects and specimens that exist in the space. When we got back to the meeting room, the children pasted their finds onto a large map of the space and also drew their ideas about what they could see from above on individual pages. After that, Angela demonstrated how to take texture rubbings so we moved back outside to collect rubbings of things like tree bark, different ground surfaces and leaves.
Then it was time to make some decisions. The children had considered the site from many perspectives and were able to come up with a list of possible sites for the EcoCubby design. After 2 rounds of voting…a winner… the space under the gum tree on the gravel.
Working on the collage map
Our finished site map
Georgie’s bird’s eye map
Hudson and Laela map the site
Bark rubbings
Our Eco-Cubby area in our room
