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In Betsy's classroom the interest in vehicles continued. Children worked in pairs to make racecars. They loved picking their favorite cars from the Matchbox Car catalogue some one had brought in and replicating the colors and designs on their own constructions. The studio influenced the classroom activity by providing a resource for materials. Somehow these shoebox and tissue paper cars found their way out of the classroom and into the studio. Instead of seeing this as "breaking the rules" for the use of studio materials we followed the children's lead on this natural overlap.
Already in this project we had made several changes in our typical format: first with the roads (we had never connected the trays before), and then with the model cars. In the same way that a bottle cap is taken off the shelves and used to represent part of a piece, the model cars came out of the classroom to be used as an additional material in the studio. The cars, which were once a final product in Betsy's room, became part of a larger story being told in the art studio. Then because the stories grew larger the children started using multiple trays to express their ideas.
 | "I made a car that moves with a garage on top of it. I also made two houses and one has a telephone on top of it. Mary (age 5) |
We had to expand on our idea of using one tray to display the artwork. At first we just followed along as Kenn added more and more trays to his airport.
 | This is an airport. It's really big, and there's three trays connected together. There's a restaurant and a bridge, (actually there's two restaurants). There are three towers with red lights with red lights on top of them so the airplanes won't crash. There are airplanes and busses too. There's this truck, and the packages go up the truck ramp. And a man is in the plane where the packages go. Kenn (age 5) |