Their Very Own Tree House

Imagine building your very own tree house, a refuge in nature where you could have complete privacy from the world. Maybe you had a structure like that as a child, but this endeavor is pure fantasy. What would your dream tree house look like? Who would be allowed to come inside? These are questions elementary art educator Lara Cannon posed to second graders as part of one of their art projects.

First the students talked about and painted trees with gouache paint, a mixture of water color and chalk. Then Lara read them a whimsical children’s book called Everything You Need for a Treehouse, The Guide to Your Own Magical Treehouse by Carter Higgins and Emily Hughes, and invited them to draw their dream treehouse using pencils and crayons within the branches of their trees.

Third-grade students loved the project so much last year that they begged to do it again. Instead of replicating the previous experience, Lara asked them to create their ideal treehouses three dimensionally. The results are wildly different structures made with many different found materials. One boy who is fascinated with carpentry put a whole vial of screws in his house. Students get to appreciate the creativity and resourcefulness of their classmates.

Lara provided the fifth graders with even more of a challenge, giving them real architectural paper to draw out blueprints of their imagined tree houses. One student created rows of flowers around her home and an elevator to make it easy for her brother to join her. The assignment includes instructions for drawing on the special paper, but Lara urged them to let their imaginations run free. Learning to express oneself through the arts is part of the fabric of The Meher Schools.

Activities like these can be fun at home as well. Ask family members to describe or draw what their magical tree house would look like. What toys or objects would they bring into their house? These discussions might result in plans to build an actual tree house, but its other main purpose is reverie.

Thinking about their own secluded place helps awakens children’s awareness that sometimes they need to find a quiet place where they can think their own thoughts. At The Meher Schools, we want children to have times and places where they generate fresh streams of creativity that nurture them in the moment and expand their own vision of the world.

Lara hopes to have an exhibit of the children’s amazing artwork in the spring.

Here’s a video of Carter Higgins reading Everything You Need for a Treehouse.