I was playing here at The Glass Studio with some solo vitrigraph and I have to say I was delighted with the experience! For those of you not familiar with vitrigraph please check out iglasssolutions.com and learn all about it. Larr Cunningham and Leigh Adams have worked together in creating the Turbo Top, which excellerates the heating of the glass, and the Turbo Light, which allows you to change the height of the kiln so you can re-seed the pot or if you need to work at different heights…with them I have witnessed or participated in pulling different shapes and squiggles and swirls and rings. Very cool stuff. You get shapes and colors that just aren’t available. But then when I was up at Bullseye last May a very controlled vitrigraph experience was witnessed. Nathan Sandberg, our instructor, used the vitrigraph kiln to make a wigwag. A wigwag cane twists in one direction, a bit is pulled and then the twisting direction is switched. This goes back and forth and the effect just makes me crazy. I’ve been meaning to do this here in my studio and today I did…and all by myself. I couldn’t have been happier and I have to say, I see so many of these in my future…in both Bullseye and Moretti. Come and get’em!!
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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]