Tall Tales- Iggy Peck, Architect

Our next book in the summer art program was Iggy Peck, Architect by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts. Iggy Peck is a very creative and independent little boy who has a passion for building things with whatever materials he can find: food, dirty diapers (that got a lot of giggles from the children!), dirt, etc. However, when he gets to the second grade, his teacher tells him that he cannot build anymore! The class goes on a field trip and Iggy's building skills save the day!

The projects that we worked on this week, all had to do with architecture.

The 2-5 year olds made paper bag houses. They started out with lunch sized paper bags and filled them with newspaper. The top was folded over and stapled. They covered the top with a folded piece of paper to make it look like a roof. The bag was then glued onto a recycled piece of cardboard, to create a base. From here, the children had a wonderful time cutting, gluing, adding texture (I brought in some texture plates and let them add texture to construction paper) and going crazy creating their houses. We had beach houses, mansions, crooked houses, etc.

The 6 and 7 year olds traveled to Egypt and made sugar cube pyramids. They heard the word sugar cube and got very excited! They started out by gluing a 6 x 6 grid of cubes onto a paper plate. Then added a 5 x 5 grid on top of that, then 4 x 4, continuing to decrease until they got to a single cube at the very top. I found that tacky glue worked better on this than regular school glue. It was a lot sturdier and held the cubes in place better.

When they were finished gluing the cubes, one of our high school volunteers took the children outside and we use spray stain (I will never go back to brush on stain again!!!) and they sprayed them light brown, making them look like they were built in the desert. Then they got to add fun details: palm trees, camels, people, etc. using any left over craft materials that we had from the previous weeks.

The 8 year olds did a lesson that I found on the  Deep Space Sparkle blog. I bought her "Architecture Made Easy" lesson guide for $5. It's a downloadable PDF file, so you just save it right to your computer and then open it any time you need a lesson. Affordable and easy! Architecture Made Easy- Deep Space Sparkle.The lesson that the children did was the castles. I started out by having a few rectangle templates ready for them to trace onto their drawing paper (usually, I don't go in for templates for my older students, but since this was a 1 time, hour class, I went ahead and did it to allow the children more time to finish the castles). Once they had the rectangles traced for the front of the castle, the turrets, etc, then they began adding details: bricks, windows, drawbridge, flags and banners, etc. They traced the entire drawing with a permanent black marker and then used crayons and colored pencils to color them in.

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