Holy cr*p! What a coincidence. I was very excited and jumped in on the idea. Immediately, the other three saw our excitement and wanted to see what the commotion in the ocean was about. I asked the others if they knew what a tree house was. My non-English language learner knew, but the other two ELLs did not. I had the student with the idea explain to them what it was in English as well as in Chinese. Moments like these are where an iPad would come in handy. Luckily for me, this resource was available. I grabbed the iPad and used google images to search for tree houses. They were absolutely amazed of the structures they saw. We got to building.
There was a slight bump in the road. They didn't know how to get started! Our pre-k classes are into a child centered/child led philosophy for learning. I was hesitant to help, but sometimes, you need a catalyst to help begin an awesome idea. I built an elevated structure, which served as the tree. Afterwards, each child added their own idea on what they wanted the tree house to look like. It was a building I had never seen before.
They wanted stairs, but wasn't sure how to construct it. Again, I intervened to give the spark they needed, and they did the rest. We stacked blocks into stairs. When they finished, there was a way to enter their tree house. It was refreshing to finally take a breather from vehicles. I began to see an interest in houses. This couldn't have occurred in a more perfect time, since we just received our dollhouse from our donorschoose.org project later in the day.