It’s a small(er) world!

Sheel

Dollhouse-Furniture Way back, when I was about eight, a friend told me a “great secret” in very hushed tones: there were little people just like us, who lived under the earth… They came out at night, and hid from the giants (us) during the day… Of these two complementary ideas, the tiny and the mammoth, the former is especially appealing. Whether it is children playing with their toys, or adults creating models of something they wish to build (or are copying from) in the ‘real’ world, miniatures fascinate us. Can we, as teachers, make use of this fascination to get children to learn? The good news is, yes, we can, and across all levels of school. Here are some ideas that can be used in the middle school. Ideally, this would work as a week-long project with different subject teachers participating, and with two consecutive periods devoted to it daily. However, you can vary the ideas and/or scale them up or down to suit your specific classroom needs, or you can choose to only carry out some of these.

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