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ISGB.org – Time for The Gathering Again

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It’s that time of year…The Gathering of The International Society of Bead Makers. This year it will be in Rochester, NY on July 29 through August 1. If you haven’t gone to a Gathering and you’re  a bead maker, you must go. It’s short notice for this one unless you’re on the east coast. Ive been to a few and have learned some amazing things as well as had a fantastic time. Alas, I will not be at this one. I’m opening my glass studio called The Glass Studio next month (but that’s a whole other blog post!) and have a big bead show the same weekend. But I guarantee I’ll be at next years.

So what happens at one of these Gatherings? Lectures and demos and parties and a Bead Bazaar and tools and supply buying and all kinds of great times! The theme this year is the Origins and Influence of the Glass Bead. Sounds good to me. So check out their site and the booklet and try to get over there if you can.

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Build a Paper City with Free Printables

My daughter’s school has project-based finals instead of tests in the spring, and in her geometry class last year the students constructed a scale model of a town complete with three-dimensional buildings. 

Of course building a paper town doesn’t have to include a geometry lesson (they also calculated the volume of their buildings) but it is a fun way to get kids to express their creativity by decorating the buildings and talking about the things they would want to include in their own town. 

Putting buildings together is a test of fine-motor skills, and if kids are working on a town together they’ll need to negotiate what goes where and why. 

Get started with the house printables from Kids Activities Blog. They’ve got a “plain” roof house and a “fancy” roof house to choose from. Just print, color, cut out and assemble. 

You might want more than just houses in your little town, though, so I went hunting for some more printable templates you can use to make different kinds of buildings. 

Brother has printable skyscrapers, cars, people, trees and lights (shown above) that are meant to be printed in color buy you can do them in black and white so kids can color them in if you want.

Printablee has another colorized set of paper buildings including different kinds of houses and something that maybe looks like a church or school. 

If you’re willing and bale to pay for printables to use in your paper town, there are lots of great ones available on Etsy. Ludlow Prints has a collection with a school, grocery store, bakery and other buildings, while Paper Fun By Yumi includes things like a hospital, fire department and police station (essential if you’ve done a community helpers unit!). 

Tiger Bee Learning has a printable set with 20 different buildings, including a bank, library, museum and zoo to name a few, as well as a blank template for kids to design their own buildings. Once you have the basics of making a piece of paper into a 3D building down, kids are sure to want to make their own buildings to add to the town. 

Older kids can also write about why they picked the buildings they did, and littler kids will have fun building their town over and over again. 

[Photo: Brother]