Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 8, 1994 TAG: 9412290075
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: S-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIMI EUBANK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"Our Town" is a bustling winter wonderland. But, as charming as it sounds, this town isn't one you could live in. It sits atop a line of tables in Julie Johnson's fifth-grade class at Penn Forest Elementary School.
The village was born from geometry class. Students applied lessons in shapes, measurements and proportion to build a village teeming with holiday spirit.
The town is complete. There's the Acme Airport, a Texaco, a church and a bookstore. There's a Texas Steak House that's takeout only and a movie theater showing "The Destroyer" and "Love."
In the past, Johnson assigned her students to make Christmas ornaments using spheres, trapezoids or squares. This year, she asked her students if they would like to build a village and the class voted unanimously to begin construction.
First, guidelines were made. No building could be higher than a shoe box standing up on its side, and there had to be a variety of shops and restaurants.
A lottery system was used to assign each student a building, so there wouldn't be any duplication. "A lot of people wanted to build a sweet shop," said Elizabeth Jetton, a pupil.
The class had two weeks to work on individual projects at home.
Students collected shoe boxes, matchboxes and pictures from magazines. They used miniature candy, ribbon and tiny plastic flowers. They made roofs of trapezoids, canopies of arcs and church steeples from triangles. They even made little villagers with toothpicks and yarn. But best of all, they used their imaginations.
Andrew Brown incorporated a little family history into his project. He had recently returned from a trip to Madison, Va., where his grandfather helped build the fire station and served as the town's first fire chief.
"I designed my fire station just like the one in Madison," Andrew said proudly.
"Our Town" may be small, but it's just the right size for a Bloomingdale's. Elizabeth Jetton painted two sturdy boxes blue and used squeezable puffy paint to create the famous lower-case lettering.
Lesley Goodman created the town's Holiday Inn, using some "really flexible cardboard" for the hotel's canopy and Holiday Inn corkscrew handles for its posts.
Christy Balzer used gold ribbon for holiday lights to illuminate Season's Department Store. She, like many other students, opted to add toothpick people to her project, a challenge that earned her and the others extra points. This was a task that even little fingers struggled with.
"It was hard to get my little people to stand up," said Christy, who used hot glue to put them in place. "I had to hold them up for a half-hour."
The coveted sweet shop went to Brian Muelenaer, who painstakingly glued a tiny gumball machine and little ice cream cones and candy canes to countertops.
For a geometry lesson, these students certainly had a lot of fun. Some were not especially thrilled at first with their assignments. "There was a lot of resistance on building the courthouse," said Lesley.
But every building showed great efforts put forth by the designers. And the students even learned a few things. Elizabeth learned that "you can't have a 6-inch door in an 8-inch building."
The students also learned that a lot of hard work and imagination goes into building a town, they said.
Johnson is quite proud of her students. She's especially happy to see how excited the class was to create something and how proud they were of their accomplishments.
Like a mini village from a modern-day Dickens tale, the wintery, holiday fever lives on in "Our Town"-in Johnson's fifth grade class, that is.
by CNB