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A different kind of building blocks
By PAULETTE LASH RITCHIE CITRUS SPRINGS -- It was a given that the cities the Citrus Springs Elementary School second-graders were planning would have a Burger King or McDonald's. But as they learned during the two or so weeks they worked on the project, there is a lot more to planning a city than providing a fast-food restaurant. Six second-grade teachers, with grants from the Southwest Florida Water Management District, known as Swiftmud, and the Citrus County Education Foundation, purchased the materials needed to help their students learn how to plan a city. Their objectives included teaching teamwork, problem solving, expanding vocabulary, career awareness, measurement, reading and research. Denise Langdon, Suzanne Swain, Nancy Breen, Darla Crotsley, Marcia Brown and Carla Eschen invited city planner Gail Easley, landscape architect Paul Gibbs, Swiftmud representative Joseph Quinn and civil engineer Gary Koltz to school to discuss their various specialties with the children. The students heard about conservation of trees and water sources, how to build a neighborhood, rules between neighborhoods and business districts, and water treatment plants -- where to send water after it is used. "That was their favorite one," Langdon said. The kits the classes used contained small cardboard buildings that the children had to assemble and paint or color to resemble homes, stores, restaurants and businesses. At the beginning of the project, the students designed their cities on paper, deciding what businesses were essential and what ones they would be willing to travel to a neighboring city to patronize. The different classes had different ideas. In Langdon's class, for example, the children decided they needed, of course, a McDonald's, other restaurants, an elementary school, a church, a barber or beauty salon, a post office, a grocery store, a doctor, a fire station, a water treatment plant, a courthouse and shops, as well as single-family homes. Breen's students wanted many of the same things, but also had apartments, a power plant and the "Magic Movie" theater. Her students were international about their restaurants, including a good old American Fat Boy's Barbecue, a New China and an Olive Garden Italian restaurant. To Torrie Haskins, 8, the most important thing in a city is water, she said, " 'cause you can go weeks without food, but days without water." Torrie, however, wasn't discounting the need for food, saying, "We need animals for food. Everybody thinks that's disgusting, but actually it isn't." Michael Makros, 7, also considered basic needs in deciding what is most important to a city. "I learned that trees are really important for cities for oxygen," he said. There were, in all, eight cities built among the six teachers. Eschen, Brown, Breen and Crotsley made theirs' class projects. Swain and Langdon, who normally team-teach, broke their two classes into four teams. Some classes used large pieces of white paper that were painted with green grass and had construction paper roads and driveways. The children made trees out of clay and painted them. Others used huge pieces of Styrofoam as bases. Brown and her class carved a river out of the Styrofoam right through the middle of town. She had boxes of finishing touches: cars for the roads and plastic greenery for bushes and trees. Blue marbles spilled into the blue-painted river gave it a bubbly appearance. Natalie Ezzell, 8, a young builder with the Langdon/Swain teams was working on her favorite part of the city project, painting, when she shared her thoughts on what it was teaching her. "I like it," she said. "I'm learning to work together with different people."
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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