Architect Storytime

Do you ever schedule things on the calendar with out having any clue on how you'll pull it together into a program? Because I certainly do... alot. This elementary architectural story time (Story Crafternoon) was no exception.

 
Inner Child Fun had done a fantastic write up on newspaper structures which was the drive to do something similar at our library. Silly me, I hadn't realized how long it would take to roll newspaper into a rod like this so I had kept putting it off until the morning of the program. Thankfully our volunteers were more than willing to spend their entire morning helping roll them for us.

 To start us off we talked about what an architect was and what sort of things they built. We talked about how buildings were made to be functional for whatever group was going to use them, like how a school might be built differently than a library.

We read If I Built a House by Chris Van Dusen which is a short adorable book about a boy building a house of his dreams and how it's unique to his own tastes and hobbies. He has a indoor trampolines that lead into a ball pit, a robotic kitchen, a racetrack and a glass bedroom way up in the sky. It's such an imaginative little book that the kids loved.

After reading that, we discussed how we might create our own houses if we could and took a couple minutes to draw our own creatively unique houses. 

One of my favorite houses had a beach built inside. It had sand and the ocean but you couldn't be sunburned at this beach at all. Of course, one kid designed a kitchen where a robot lived so he would never have to wash dishes. Another girl drew her house without a kitchen so she wouldn't have them to even wash them. Sensing a theme here? Kids don't like to wash dishes?

Once we'd had a snack and shared our personalized homes we moved on to the newspaper structures which were a HUGE hit. We spread out and built for nearly 30 minutes. We used pipe cleaners to bind the rods together just like on Inner Child Fun and it worked perfectly. All the kids took their structures home and several even asked if they could have some of the rods and pipe cleaners to take home to continue working on their projects.