Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 15, 1994 TAG: 9412230029
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: S1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETSY BIESENBACH STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The entire student body - that's 502 children in grades K-5 -is helping build a giant gingerbread house.
The knee-high structure sits on a table and dominates the school's lobby. Candies of every description are cemented to the house with meringue frosting, but the eager workers sometimes forget to wait long enough for it to set. So some candies end up on the floor, where lots of little feet quickly turn them to dust.
Bonnie Dowdy, the school's secretary, got the idea for the project after seeing a picture of a gingerbread house in a magazine. Principal Mitchell Bowman made a wooden frame, using the picture as a guide.
"I've learned a lot about making gingerbread houses," he laughed.
The two-story house has a bay window and a front porch, which is supported by three thick peppermint sticks. The walls and roof are made of graham crackers instead of gingerbread. For years, Bowman said, the kindergarten classes have made graham cracker houses with milk carton frames and this is just an extension of that idea.
Bowman estimated that it took about 24 boxes of crackers to cover the house. The crackers were donated to the school by Kroger's and by Nabisco, and each class was responsible for bringing a certain kind of candy to school from home.
The leftovers will be put in baskets the school makes up each year for the needy. The only cost to the school was $20 for the wooden frame.
The fifth-graders attached the crackers to the frame with Elmer's glue. Everything else on the house is edible, but Bowman said he doubts anyone would actually eat it, since so many people have handled the candies.
After Christmas, the house will be donated to a nursing home or other organization that might enjoy it.
Work began at the end of November and was finished on Dec.9. When it was done, every child in the school had a chance to put candy on the house.
For Georganna Hite, who teaches art at the school twice a week, it meant not only deciding which candies would go where, but also organizing the schedule so that each class had its own time to work on the project.
The kindergartners were responsible for bringing peppermints, and were allowed to line up and stick gumdrops on the house one by one.
"It's pretty," said Jacob Willis, 5. "It has candy all over it."
In addition to affixing the graham crackers, the fifth-graders decorated the roof and chimney of the house.
The crackers were hard to work with, said April Lineberry, 10, because they tended to break.
Although the children worked on the house for just two weeks, "it seemed like a month," said Elizabeth Albright, age 11.
"This is better than doing work," said Ray Manning, 10, who got to miss a language-arts class to work on the house's chimney.
Each class also made a window for the house. Tamomi Nishio, a Japanese exchange teacher, helped her class decorate their window with origami.
The response from the children, parents and visitors has been wonderful, Bowman said. "It has been much more successful than we had anticipated."
Besides supervising the decoration, Hite also made up about two gallons of icing, which the children seem to like, Bowman said. Most of them walk away licking their fingers.
At least one little girl in Wendy Coleman's kindergarten class tried licking her fingers before she put her candy on the house. Coleman gently explained to her that was not how it was done.
Although Hite said building the house was a good creative outlet for the children, Bowman said he wasn't going to pretend that the project had much educational value.
"It's to enjoy. It's Christmas, and they're children," he said.
"See, look there," he added, pointing to a first-grader who sat looking at the house, his eyes wide with wonder. "That's why we did it."
by CNB