A kids's neighborhood college: How do first graders create a whole new neighborhood? With a Romare Bearden inspired group collage!

Michael Bruno's first-grade class at New York's Brooklyn Friends School created this fabulous cityscape collage with the help of artist Christy Hale. in a project that encourages both individual and cooperative work, students make observations and take photographs on neighborhood walks, then return inside to make their own new neighborhoods, first as a collage and then as a complex, three-dimensional block town.

Making the-collage buildings is fun and demanding. The class spends time brainstorming the needs and wishes of a community, from water supply to ice cream shops. Then each student chooses a neighborhood building and recreates it with paper. The students use photos, newspaper or magazine clippings, and bits of cloth or colored paper. They glue these materials down and then draw and paint to complete the neighborhood scenes. In some of the buildings there are hand-drawn or collaged signs, as well as windows and doors that reveal what's happening inside. Finally, the children gather the completed building panels together and attach them with tape across the back. A new neighborhood is born! These innovative first graders then use what they've learned to create their own elaborate town built out of blocks.