My fourth-graders had a great time participating in Terrace Town activities this year. We worked on this hands-on, interdisciplinary architecture unit for six to eight weeks incorporating science, math, social studies, writing and art and architecture into our own planned "city."

Students used spatial skills in doing a building activity with blocks with Monona Terrace staff, went on neighborhood walks and worked with Madison architect, Kristi Jacobs.

At the beginning of our Terrace Town Project, students wrote descriptive essays about their favorite places and made collages out of magazines to help them think about the kinds of things they liked to have in their natural environments.

They then discussed the kind of town they would want to live in, what it would look like, and what kind of place it would be. Then the kids drew maps of towns in small groups, wrote about them and presented their work to each other.

After that, the class decided to build a modern town (much like Madison) with small privately-owned businesses, community bikes, trolleys, hybrid and other alternative-energy cars, lots of bike paths and solar heated buildings.

For the building part, the students worked on area and scale to measure, cut, draw and build their buildings. Some of the kids took home boxes and made their houses and apartments at home. The rest of the buildings were built by partners, after the process of deciding what we "needed and wanted" in our town.

When it came time to lay out our town (which was named "Sun Splash" after a democratic nomination and voting process) we first had to learn about zoning ordinances. Most people were happy with the final building placement, though at the beginning, the students all wanted to have their residential buildings in the "more desirable" location by the lake.

When at last we were able to go to Monona Terrace on March 3 to set up our town, complete with streetlights, park benches and little red bikes and to see all the other cool towns that other area students had built, I could feel the sense of accomplishment among the students in my class. I'm sure that working on our Terrace Town Project is something that my students will not soon forget.

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