From a Star Wars AT-AT Walker made of cardboard and old gift cards to a SkyTrain station crafted out of egg cartons, kids at Brentwood Park put the contents of their recycling bins to imaginative uses this month.
For about six weeks, students and staff at the school took part in its second annual Great Re-Purpose Project on Nov. 23.
Using cardboard and other recycled materials, students were challenged to imagine, design and build …whatever.
Each class approached the school-wide project in its own way, with some working as a group and others leaving students free to pursue individual projects.
Estelle Keeler’s Grade 6/7 class, for example, built puppet theatres out of repurposed materials and then wrote, staged and videoed fairy tale puppet shows with a twist, including a trans version of Rapunzel.
Grade 5/6 classes taught by Breanna Willis and Lindsay Allen opted to explore the laws of motion by hosting a class amusement park, complete with carnival games fashioned out of recycled stuff.
At the other end of the school, kindergarten teacher Jessica Taylor, Grade 1 teachers Kirsten Brolin and Shannon Fleming; and Grade 1/2 Priscilla Yap had their students collaborate on building a city, including things that move, living things and structures, like gardens, pets and an egg-carton SkyTrain station.
Brentwood Park first took up the project last year, after learning about the Global Cardboard Challenge, an annual event inspired by the short documentary Caine’s Arcade.
The film is about a boy in East Los Angeles who built his own arcade out of cardboard in his dad’s parts shop.
Brentwood Park decided to expand its project this year to include anything repurposed, but the activities are still designed to encourage students to play and learn using simple materials to build things they imagine.
The annual project encourages collaboration, creativity and imagination, according to principal Jillian Lewis, and ties in nicely with the province’s new applied skills, design and technologies (ADST) curriculum.
“The redesigned curriculum has a big focus on what kids can do, how they apply their learning,” Lewis said. “They were so engaged last year with it, and the teachers were really engaged in it, and it gave us an opportunity to dive into the redesigned curriculum. It was such a wonderful experience that we said right away last year that we would do this again.”
