Box Sculptures in Preschool

As I mentioned a week or so ago, this past week we made box sculptures at school.  I had been collecting household boxes all school year long, so I had a quite a collection.  In fact, every time over the past seven months that I found one of these boxes in the recycling bin I would fuss at the family.  "'B' is for Box", I scolded, and put the box in the garage.  Eventually I starting flattening them and storing them up in garage/loft above the cars.

Although actually, we didn't use them during Letter B week.  I decided to move them to Letter X, since activities for that letter are pretty few and far between.

So last week I asked bribed my sons to "reconstitute" them with packing tape and then I piled them in the car.

Here's how they looked on the all piled in and ready to roll:

I ended up with over 200 boxes (which I suppose tells a lot about how much packaged food our family eats).  Here some of them in the classroom waiting to be used:

As you might imagine, the kids had a great time gluing their boxes together.

Some just wanted to make their sculptures as tall as possible.  To enable this, we ended up using a lot of our favorite colored masking tape to hold them together while they dried:

Some were happy to spread their sculptures out and build several towers beside each other - kind of like a city block in box form:

 On Day Two we had several people make Robots:

Here are several of the sculptures waiting to dry and be taken home:

One of my favorite parts of the project was the parents' expression when I opened the classroom doors at the end of the day and carried out the sculptures.  To their credit, no one fussed or even looked negative about taking home such bulky items made out of recycling objects.

I will definitely do this activity again, but next year I will not make them so close to Spring Break.  As it was, we made them the two days before the break and I didn't want to leave them in the room until we returned.  That way if we made them another week, we could come back to them when they were dry and paint them. Now, that would be fun.

I will also try to collect more smaller boxes.  This will allow them to build higher sculptures without adding so much bulk to the top.

One advantage to this project being finished is clearing out the multitude of boxes that have been living in our garage all school year long.  The disadvantage is that I am now completely stymied when I empty out a box. Do I put it in the recycling bin, or start saving again?  I just don't know.

But we certainly had a good time with the boxes that I just passed on to Little People.