A Box with Three Lives
On a Monday morning, Owen’s dad brought a large cardboard box to the class after a weekend delivery of a new washing machine. The teacher, Ms. Mary, set the box in the middle of the meeting circle and said, “H-mmm, I wonder what we could do with this, would you like to play with it?” A chorus of voices ensued with many children talking all at once. Ms. Mary said, “let’s get a big piece of paper and write down all of our ideas and then maybe we can decide.” A few minutes later, the list included turning the box into a space ship, boat, zoo, race car, and bus.
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The children decided after much discussion that it should become a spooky house. Ms. Mary helped the children generate a list of needed materials, create a design team, and assign jobs. After the house was finished and the children had played in it for several days, they decided they wanted to share it with the children in another classroom. They made additional items such as spiders, paper ghosts, and bats. They recorded a sound track of scary noises and wrote invitations, and, when the other children came to visit the house, took turns as tour guides using dress-up clothes from the dramatic play area.
When Ms. Mary noticed that the children’s interest in the box had waned, she asked them if they were finished. Instead of discarding it, the children decided that since it already had windows and doors, they could repaint it to turn it into the Three Little Pigs’ brick house, which they worked on over the next two weeks. Play in the box ended only when it finally collapsed, but then, since it had been painted on the outside to look like bricks, they cut it up to make a road on the playground. One box, weeks of inventive play