the idea: desgin a city that is easy to get around and has everything a person needs to live

the ideator: Three kids from one of my summer classes

Teaching is a fluid beast.  You make lesson plans, fill in the details, and then you get in the classroom and realize that none of it will work.  Or, if you’re lucky, it will work but it always needs tweaking.

This is exactly the situation I was in while teaching at a summer camp this week up in Concord, MA.  The theme was transportation and I planned all my lessons, got into the classroom, and realized that some would take twenty minutes while others would take two hours.  None, of course, were neatly finished by all the children in the one hour time slot.  But when does that happen?

The Awesome City was created in a project that originally wasn’t part of the plan.  I broke the kids into groups on the second day (I could already tell who to make sure that I didn’t put in a group together).  Then I told them each to design the best city they could.  They had to remember everything a city needed, make the roads easy to maneuver, and do it all in secrecy so the other groups wouldn’t know.

Not only did this take up two lesson times, it also was completely enthralling for the kids.  Every time they came into the class they asked if they could work on it, they joked about peeking at each other’s pieces, and they whispered with their group about new things to add.

If you’ll notice, the Awesome City includes a building called “Reasons to be Cheerful,” schools, library, a mustache stature, a funky shaped art museum, and many more awesome things.  Now we just need to sneak Waldo in there.