liberty bell invented a great project for her governor's school workshops: use of pictures of buildings/groups of buildings and a bottle of whiteout or white paint > covering or erasing as an act of design. she could probably describe it better. i gotta go finish cutting the lawn.

Actually it wasn't my invention entirely, it was a grad school project by one of my classmates: take a print of a Vermeer painting, at about 8.5x11, and use gesso to erase the space of the painting until you find a form (more or less).

What I did was change it to a high school student project: each student had 2 8.5x11 foamcore boards with the same photo of a local building on it. The building was formerly a house that has been renovated into a business - done very well and very modern. The project I gave was to "reimagine" two versions of the building: one that made it look more like a "business" and one that made it look more like a "house", using gesso. It was fairly successful as a project for kids, and I prefaced it with a slide talk about what makes a building look "housey": peaked roof, chimney, front door, window mullions, and how those same elements could be seen or not in some contemporary high-density housing and former industrial buildings turned into housing.

I think a discussion of the iconography of a house, church, office, store, fire station, library etc. would not be out of reach for kindergarteners (sp?). Also, introduce the concept of a floor plan by having them draw their bedroom!

A project Steven and I did together with the high school kids was to give them each a shoe box (all identical - actually we used envelope boxes from a printer) and have them build a landscape within it. They drew the plan and sections of the empty box at full scale, then added in the drawings of the model elements they built later. My other co-teacher and I did a variation on this called "Vegetable House" in which we gave the kids the box and had them draft it empty, then place several root vegetables in it and draw them by hand with charcoal - the contrast between drafted and hand-shaded volumes was really beautiful. I would think this could be easily adapted to a kinderg. project: say the box is a house, have them locate front door, etc., then give them clay to use as the inhabitants of the house and place the people in there (maybe in their own bedroom, kitchen, etc), maybe with furniture, to talk about the difference between moveable components of the house and the static enclosure.

Angus has these four architecture picture books: architecture animals, arch. counts, arch. shapes, and arch. colors. All have pics of buildings displaying a certain shape, or color, or seven windows, etc. The animals one is great as is shows gargoyles, decorative friezes, and of course the damn Venturi duck. I think little kids would get a kick out of looking at images of buildigns and trying to find the frog, or count the windows, etc. It seems like there is a discussion about decoration vs. structure to be found in that slide talk...

And of course model building with popsicle sticks is a given, right?

Thanks.....keep them coming....were thinking about a montage of world homes...past and present...

In college we did a design literacy program with a few activities that may be relevant.
We had the students make collages of their personal space, bedroom, house or whatever worked. We had them focus on what made it theirs, and then on what made it a house/bedroom, etc. We tried to focus on the elements that made a space a bedroom versus a living room, a house versus a school.

We had the students map the route from home to school in any way they saw fit, identifying landmarks, modes of transportation, etc that were in their mind's eye the equivalent to their path to school. It was interesting in that two kids living next door to each other perceived the path completely differently. We could then focus on the designed elements that made up the route.

I think both of these activities can be adapted to kindergarten students.

j