Penn State Cooperative Extension Economic and Community Development group took a new approach with their informational booth at Ag Progress Days this year. The new focus was to provide visual, and hands-on learning to the many children who attend the event. This was accomplished by the use of the Box City materials and there was a lot of enthusiasm at APD for the project.  

In a nutshell, as children approached the booth, we would encourage them to "help us build our city."  They took a cardboard house building form, and used crayons and/or markers to make it "look real."  When they were finished their creation, they were asked to place it on a brown paper-covered table, somewhere in the "community," and then to draw a driveway, lane or road to link it with the rest of the community.  Many children made houses; but, with a little conversation and encouragement, the town also had a school (with a bus drawn on front), a post office, a factory, and a bank.  The brown paper had a pond (with ducks) and a soccer field added.  The town took shape.  

It was definitely NOT difficult for the children to stay engaged -- some longer than parents or grandparents wanted to linger at our booth.  The only difficult thing was leaving their house behind in the town for others to enjoy.  The rewarding point for me was toward the end of Tuesday, when a young man who had taken the "community planner" role very seriously came back to see how the community had grown.  He noticed things that others had changed in his absence -- and he approved of some, but changed others back "the way they were supposed to be."  I thought I saw a community planner in the making.

There were so many positive bits of impact about this project -- the enthusiasm of the children, the parents' involvement from the sidelines, the ways that some of the older ones seemed to grasp the need for a complete community instead of a collection of houses. 

September, 2007