A House Made of Sticks

The majority of parents know exactly what their role is when the alarm goes off in the morning: it’s the school run, which I would imagine is pretty predictable on the whole. In stark contrast, my mornings prior to breakfast time are always different. Learning sessions happen, however it remains fresh and unpredictable day to day, dependant a great deal on the children’s level of concentration, interest and general head space. It may be a very successful, productive morning for one or two, and one may need to process and time alone and have no concentration for lessons. They may switch in at another point in the day and study something totally different from the others.

Sophia has been quite occupied in drawing our house for the past month, and she is not content to simply produce the generic form of a house anymore. She’s been through that stage and now only concentrates on exact replicas of our three storey house. She draws it as if you are looking in at an open dollhouse, seeing all the rooms and the dolls at play. She draws us all in the house, and she is very precise, adding in intricate detail. Mummy is often in the kitchen of the bottom floor cooking pancakes. Daddy is on the top floor sat in a chair and at his desk and computer working away. The three children are in the lounge, sat on the sofa, with the remote between them, watching tv. She includes details like the beds on the top floor, and the characters on the tv screen. 

Back to this particular morning at 6am, as I make my way down the stairs, Sophia greets me with yet another rendition of this picture. She then informs me she wants to make a physical representation of this house she has drawn. I feel compelled to reiterate it is 6am at this point. Now I am either my worst enemy, or the best home school teacher alive, or simply a crazy person (the jury is out on this point). Where a normal parent would brush this request aside, or schedule it for an arts and crafts project later that day, I accepted this as a challenge and got stupidly excited about the prospect of making a model of our house.

It should be stated at this point that this is the first construction project we have ever attempted and we are not set up for this type of crafting endeavour in the slightest. However Sophia was incredibly keen and I was like a child at Christmas, rummaging through my teacher craft drawers for suitable materials. I found a cardboard base, the pva glue, a cardboard insert from a previous package delivery, two packets of lollypop sticks, and coloured papers and set to work. A crafting tip for those with young children is to just save anything you can possibly think of for the future, you never know what may come in handy.

I soon realised that Sophia, despite being very skilled in tiny Lego constructions with immense concentration in this field, has no patience in cardboard construction. No matter, I was invested at this point. Kira joined me at this stage and she was keen to get stuck into building the floors for inside the building. So she was busy sticking lollypops on to cardboard inserts (I had no idea at this point how I was going to suspend the two upper floors within the structure). I was making the outside building stable, standing upright independently, stuck to the cardboard base.

The floors were finished and my helper wandered off and I was left chasing after Xander who kept running off with the lollypop sticks. Sophia re-emerged and was very impressed by our progress and took over the design of the outside walls of the building and the garden. She was not amused however when we ran out of sticks before she was finished. I encouraged a feature wall of buttons to finish it off which kept her interested. 


I was brainstorming with myself how to hold the floors up....as obviously they wanted it to be a usable construction for their animals and future princess puppets they were making. I had a brainwave, and got some math blocks and created walls out of them and covered them with coloured paper and they sufficed in holding up the upper floors. The project was complete. It certainly was not perfect, but it was a family effort and we had a successful outcome. We had a doll house version of our house....it was now 7.30am. Breakfast time everyone!



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