Imagine a City

Magnolia has been busy all month imagining, planning, and constructing our very own city. Our work was guided by a few big questions:

What is a city?
What buildings are there and who lives in a city?
What makes a city special?

We started by making a list.

 

Friends shared their ideas about cities. Some created drawings of their ideas, such as “windows of the building, a grocery store, a bus, cars, Moumin and Emily in a city, a ship carrying people and cars, beep beep, a heart, there is love in a city.”

We shared that we may all live in different cities, but we go to school in Berkeley California. Berkeley California is a city on Ohlone Land, on Turtle Island. Our classroom is Magnolia classroom.

Then, we took a walk in our neighborhood! We had a safety plan and divided into pairs for our walk. Thank you to the grownups that came on our walk with us! Watch the video below to to see our journey.

Once we had our walk, we checked off the things we saw on our prediction list. We noticed that we did not see any other children and wondered: are they all at school? We also did not see any skyscrapers, but did see a tall building under construction with a crane!

It became time for us to start imagining what a city might be like if we planned it together! Robin’s mom Melissa who is an architect, brought us some books about blueprints. Blueprints are sort of like maps that architects use to create a visual plan for a building. They used to be blue but now they are printed in black and white or color. We were inspired by the old fashioned style of blueprints and made our own with blue paper and white paint.

Next, we welcomed all kinds of donated materials to our classroom. We were gifted lots of cardboard, special paper, tinfoil, plastic and more to create our own city. We used paper mache to make our boxes sturdy and light brown so we could paint our own designs. We cut out tiny pieces of tinfoil to create windows for our buildings. Friends took turns deciding what each building might be. We decided as a group on a zoo, a house, a dessert restaurant, a hospital or place for people to be healthy and safe, a place for people to get food and other things that they need for free, an office where people do work, a school, and a grocery store.

It was time to add signs to our building and place them on our big work table. Some friends made a river out of special blue paper. Others added grass made out of small shreds of green paper. Each child took turns posing for a photo which shows them doing something in a city. Some chose to look high up in the sky at a tall building, some chose to be bent down looking for flowers, while others decided their pose would include pointing. Teachers printed these photos out and attached them to corks so they would be movable around the city.

Emily videotaped the city and some of our documentation around the classroom, then invited the children to watch the footage and narrate. Please enjoy this video culmination of our wonderful city!

♥