The National Building Museum
Washington, DC
Instructional Unit:
It is my hope that by teaching children to use their senses to become more aware of and in-tune with the immediate environment, they will heighten and enrich their life now and develop into informed adults who will make sound judgments for future environments.
Curriculum Unit:
Grade 1
General
The Arlington County first grade curriculum for the gifted in the area of social studies is entitled Environments. A class trip to the National Building Museum dovetails beautifully with the environment curriculum as well as supporting many aspects of the general first grade curriculum, ie:social studies-basic needs (shelter), communities, Science-the 5 senses, animal shelters, along with language arts, fine arts and math. The wide range of tours offered by the National Building Museum including, city planning, zoning, preservation, and how to read cultural information from existing structures. This unit has endless possibilities for an integrated curriculum for multi-ages grouped students.I have chosen to focus on the specific building elements of design (shape, pattern, structure, texture, color and scale.
Objectives:
1. Students will be able to discern shapes and patterns in architecture.
2. Students will be able to identify specific building materials according to color, texture, and its use or need.
3.Students will develop skills to help them become more aware of the immediate and future environments in terms if aesthetics and culture.
Pre-Visit Activities:
The unit will be introduced with the reading of the book, Need a House? Call Ms. Mouse! It is a wonderfully illustrated children's book telling how Ms. Mouse creates and designs a home to meet the specific needs of her animal friends. For example, the squirrels wish to have their tree house feel like a spaceship. Owl's castle adobe becomes a night-time start-gazing observatory. Prediction questions might be:
1. Where do you think brown trout will want his house?
2. Who do you think would want to have his house near land and water?
Related Activities for integrated curriculum.
Language Arts:
1. If a building could talk. Use idea of window are eyes, doors are mouths, etc. Let children draw a personified house. Use another paper to have them write a description of what their house would say. Is it new or old, tire, full, etc. Use color and texture words to help describe.
2. Word search. Use building vocabulary words.
3. Slides of building materials and products, quarry for stone, sand for glass, forest for lumber. Have students research and write about the process
.
4. Label a house. Use vocabulary for cut and paste activity.
Vocabulary words:
Arch
Architecture
Atrium
Building
Balcony
Buttress
Column
Color
Culture
Design
Cornice
Dome
Ecosystem
Environment
Door
Molding
House
Historical
Porch
Roof
Material
Ornamentation
Scale
Texture
Sky Light
Stairs
Windows
5. Words cards. Make words cards that children may stick on objects to label object by shape, color, and texture. They can also be shape, color, and texture coded to connect the printed word with the described object.
6. Guided imagery. What is your favorite place? Tell students you would like to take them to a silent time to think about their favorite place. Don't define place. Have students close their eyes, speak slowly in a quiet voice. Tell them not to answer the questions out loud but to let the answer make a picture in their head.
-Are you inside or outside?
-What time of day or night is it?
-Is it light or dark?
-What do you see there?
-What colors do you see?
-What can you hear?
-What smells can you remember?
-Can you taste anything there?
-What can you touch?
-Are you alone?
-Is there anyone else there, animals or birds?
-How do you feel?
-What do you do while you are there?
Students still do not name their place. Explain they are going to answer the question on paper and try to guess one anothers' place. Remind to think of the 5 senses as they write. A follow-up could be to draw their place.
7. Poetry. Make a list of words that describe your house-use them to make a poem.
8. Draw your home from memory. Encourage students to use much detail. For homework, have students draw and on-site version of their home (send note home to parents). Place the drawings side by side to compare. Make a list of the elements they forgot.
9. My home questionnaire.Fill in the blanks (?).
My home is ? stories high. It is made of ? It's colors are? There are ? windows and ? doors in my house. The front door is made of ? It is ? feet by ? feet. Some other things on the front of my house are ? Some things in my yard are ? The roof of my house looks like this shape (draw). It is covered with ?
10. Develop visual glossaries. Use photo;s, cut out pictures from magazines, or drawings to develop a notebook of vocabulary words.
Math Activities
1. Vocabulary for geometric shapes-square, circle, rectangle, triangle, half-circle, arch,-cut out shapes from colored construction paper. Give several to each student and let them place on objects in the room with that shape.
2. Measurement and scale. Find ways to measure the room or objects in the room. Wit your hand, pencil, shoe, etc.
3. Make a person to fir the building on the same size paper. Make 3-4 drawings of a building each with a different proportion. have students draw a person to fit each building.
4. How big is a period? Give each student a square piece of paper. Ask them to make a dot of any size. Ask for samples of a very small dot, a medium dot and a very large dot. Tape them up and ask students to imagine the dots area period at the end of a sentence. Make up a short sentence, and show the size of the letters needed to fit each dot. Explain the size can change but must stay in scale with the dot.
5. Gertrude's Secret
A computer game for grades K-3 which used shapes and colors to create patterns. A fun way to increase sequence and logic.
Social Studies
1. Show slides of home from various cultures from around the world. Discuss their shape and the materials used to build them. Why? Where are the materials obtained? How? How does climate and culture change the way we live and build? Research a culture. Build a model house for that culture. Re-ceate-what if igloos were not made of ice?What if pueblos had only 2 or 3 people living in them? What if your house was a space station?
2. Toothpick and marshmallow construction. Hand out colored toothpicks and miniature marshmallows (spray with hair spray so they won't be eaten). Give students a non-stop work time (10-15 minutes) to make a structure. Who has the highest? the widest?the smallest? the most stable?
Art Activities
1. Create columns. Show slides or drawings of the 3 orders of Greek columns (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian). Use paper towel tubes to shoe hoe a column is weak lying on its side (can be created by a book) and strong when standing up (supports same book on its end). Let students design from 3 examples, their own columns using a variety of materials applied to the toweling tubes. Column designs may also be created from clay.
2. Make a quilt. A paper or fabric quilt may be made by each student developing a pattern on a square. When they are complete, glue or stitch them together.
3. Prepare simple geometric shapes from black construction paper. Give each student a chance to play with and become familiar with shape names. After looking at pictures of a built environment, have students arrange shapes into a picture of a city scape or street scape. Glue them on white paper. Later, other color shapes may be added to create door, windows, etc., texture, color.
4. How do you feel about color? Have each studentselect a crayon. Hand out simple line drawings of familiar objects. Tell them to color using just the one crayon they selected. Allow time for comments on how they feel about the wrong colors-green horse, blue carrots.
5. Hand out 2 copies of a piece of paper with a room draw on it.Have them color one the way they would like it to look and one the way they would dislike. Compare the elements.
6. Nature walk. Take a walk to observe structured elements in nature. Column=tree trunk, arch=branch.
7. Rubbings. Use string paper and peeled crayons(for side use) to make rubbings of textured objects.
8. Provide a wide variety of objects with a variety of textures. Let children reach into a paper bag, but not remove the object, feel it, and then describe the way it feels-create a list of texture words.
9. Label objects in room according to texture. Talk about why that material was used. Think about alternatives. Why are your chairs not made of spaghetti? floors made of soap? walls sand paper?
On-Site Activities:
Participate in prearranged school program offered by the museum, City by Design and Building Pursuit. They both involve hands-on activities. City by Design ends with the children building a 20' x 30'grid. Building Pursuit has students solve a mystery by using sensory clues on how to read a building.
Follow-Up Activities:
1. Cooperative learning to develop a specific needs building. After lunch have students spend some sharing experiences of the trip. Lead discussion toward building elements. Divide students into groups on 4 or 5 with a team leader. Give each leader a cardboard box filled with a variety of building materials and an envelope. The envelope will contain a description of who needs the building the team constructs. Each team will have to make decisions based on the shape, pattern, structure, texture, color and scale. For example-"Hi! my name is Zeke. I am a small rodent,. I like safe, dark tunnels that let me travel underground. I have a large family. We eat all the time so I must have a good place to store my food. We do not always stay underground so please make places where we can get outside to gather food. I am 3" long (including my tail) and 1 1/2" tall. I can squeeze into tight spaces".
Other possibilities would include facts that would allow children to make group decisions about size, measurement, shape, color, and texture. The structure might also have to consider climatic and cultural differences as a well as handicapping disabilities.
2. Plan and design a new school.
S What could you substitute for the teacher?C Combine 2 elements to make new furniture.A Adjust the school hours.M Modify the doors, windows, stairs.P Find other uses for the rooms.
E Eliminate parts of the school.R Rearrange-regroup anything in the school.
3. Make a city scape wall mural use butcher block paper to outline a city horizon silhouette. Have students fill in foreground (draw, cut and paste) with buildings, streets, lamp posts, actually from neighborhood or imagined.
Appendices: none
Bibliography:
Architecture is Elementary , Nathan Winters, Gibbs Smith, Inc. Salt Lake City
At Home-Who is at Home in an Igloo? Tony Tallerico, Tuffy Books, Inc. NY.
How Buildings Work , Edward Allen, Oxford University Press
Need a House? Call Ms. Mouse , George Mendoza, Grosset and Dunlop, NY
The Inside-Outside Book , Roxie Munroe, E.P. Dutton, NY
The Source Book-Learning by Design , Alan Sandler, American Institute of Architects Press, Washington, DC
Gertrude's Secret , Apple computer software, The Learning Company, 1-800-852-2255
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