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We invited the children to work in small, collaborative teams to build Pike Place Market with Legos. We set up this work to emphasize negotiated decision-making, collaboration, and collectivity. We wanted the children to practice the big ideas we'd been exploring. We wanted Lego Pike Place Market to be an experience of group effort and shared ownership: If Legotown was an embodiment of individualism, Lego Pike Place Market would be an experiment in collectivity and consensus.

We offered the children some guidelines to steer them into a new way of interacting with each other and with the Legos: "Create teams of two or three people, decide as a team on some element of Pike Place Market that you'll build, and then start constructing." The first day or two, children created signs warning the other teams "Do Not Touch" their collaboratively constructed vegetable, fruit, and crafts stands. As they settled into this construction project, though, the teams softened the rigid boundaries around their work and began to leave notes for each other describing their work and proposing next steps for Pike Place Market. We celebrated this shift, seeing it as a sign that the children were beginning to integrate the thinking of the last months into their interactions.

These women are evil and politically manipulative.

Hilltop is housed in a church, and over a long weekend, some children in the congregation who were playing in our space accidentally demolished Legotown.

Those evil Church children demolished Legotown.

I doubt any of this really happened.

These people are just like Delores Umbrage.

More like the demon spawn of Dolores Umbridge and a Dementor.

Can you imagine being six or eight years old and having to go to a class taught by these soul-sucking killjoys?

I don't recall how old I was when I decided that anyone who used the word "collective" was my mortal enemy, but it's going to happen a lot sooner to these poor little tykes.

-ccm

“These people are just like Delores Umbrage.”

Book 5 of the Potter series convinced me that, despite the liberal decline of the UK in general, at least the redoubtable Mrs. Rowling is on our side.