Small is Beautiful

This week, the first week of my summer vacation, I have been thinking about embracing small things in life: small moments of joy, small moments of beauty, and small moments of gratitude. E.F. Schumacher, a British economist and writer, best known for his book, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered, first proposed this concept of idealizing small things. Schumacher is called the hero of sustainability because he was one of the first people to highlight the depletion of natural resources as a threat to industrialization. He thought that our economic foundations should be based on smaller human scale, local needs and resources, appropriate technology, human and environmental well-being, and local cooperative ownership of businesses.  Schumacher believed that progress was not about making things bigger and more complex but about making things smaller and simpler.

Every spring for the last three years, the 5th grade math project based learning unit centered on the “Small is Beautiful” concept, which is named the Tiny House project. Students learn about the economics, sustainability, and cultural aspects of housing. Each student is tasked with creating a tiny house for a client. Their clients are the school’s staff and faculty members, who provide the children with parameters for building their tiny houses. Working within these parameters, the children design and build a model of a tiny home.

Over the last three years, this project has expanded and been refined. It takes a lot of preplanning, creativity, and just plain old sweat equity on both the teacher’s and the students’ parts. I love this project because students learn by actively considering sustainability concepts and realizing them when designing their house. I wanted to be a small part of this project, and the best way I knew to do this was to have the students reflect on the building of their homes using poetry.

I created a poetry lesson that asked the students to build poems about their tiny house. They could explain how they built the tiny house, or they could describe the layout of the tiny house, or they could explain why tiny houses are important. We reviewed all the different poetry forms and devices they had learned earlier in the year. I asked them to try a couple of different forms and then decide which one they liked the best to feature on their display board.. I encouraged them to experiment, explore, and have fun. After I shared a few examples and we wrote a group tiny house poem, the students were ready to write poems on their own. They rhymed, they created haikus, and they constructed poems that reflected the process of building their tiny homes. Here are my examples:

Once the students had completed creating and ebook of their process, the tiny house model, and the display board with brochures, science habitat connection, and the poems, there was an after school event to present all their hard work to their clients and parents. It was a wonderful celebration. Priscilla, my tiny house designer, worked meticulously on my home adding details that I asked for, and even included tiny rocking chairs on my patio so I could sit and look out onto my peaceful mountains (the habitat that I had chosen). Priscilla gave me lots of storage space for books and art supplies, and she made a garden, which I hadn’t thought to ask for. All the students used their ingenuity to create these tiny homes. I hope one day, I will have a tiny mountain retreat just like Priscilla imagined.