Kansas City area students brought dozens of picture books to life using clay, foam and felt for the Rabbit Hole’s first annual design challenge.
The museum located in North Kansas City creates life-sized exhibits of classic books that children and families can fully immerse themselves in. Through its new project, “Beyond the Page,” students had the opportunity to envision what their own exhibits could look like.
More than 200 students in fourth through eighth grade have been working with artists and fabricators from the children’s literary museum all semester to design exhibit models based on a book of their choosing. Eleven classrooms across the Kansas City area participated and split into smaller groups to compete.
Students first took a field trip to Rabbit Hole to understand how creating exhibits works and to pick out books for consideration, but narrowing down which to base their model on was no easy feat.
At English Landing Elementary School in the Park Hill School District, each group member researched a different book that they thought would be a good fit for the project and then tried to convince the rest of their team.
Charlotte, a fourth grader at English Landing, said her team decided on the book “The Smallest Girl in the Smallest Grade” because of its message to stand up to bullying when you see it happening.
“It was really important, because lots of people bully each other in the world, and then it's really bad for people,” Charlotte said. “And some people don't believe in themselves, like they don't think they can help, but it's really important that you do help, because it can help the world a lot.”
Students then researched their chosen book as a group, creating different sketches and ideas of which scenes they wanted to represent. Each student design team was paired with mentors from the Rabbit Hole team to guide them through designing an exhibit.
Josephine, another fourth grader on the team, said they were still sketching out ideas when the Rabbit Hole artists came to help.
“They gave us really good ideas too, and one of our ideas that they helped us think of was making two separate rooms for our exhibit,” Josephine said.
Her team’s final design includes a cafeteria filled with trays of pipe-cleaner food and mini milk cartons made of clay. The other side of the model features a classroom with rows of desks facing a whiteboard sprawled with the message “Be kind! No bullying!”
The group said both represent important scenes from their picture book, including a scene where the main character stands up to her whole grade in the cafeteria and decides to be an “upstander” instead of a bystander to bullying.
“I think all of our favorite parts was all the hands up on the back wall agreeing with Sally, our main character, to be an upstander and stop bullying,” Cora, a fourth grader, said.
How students understood major themes in their chosen book is one of the criteria judges considered at Monday’s design fair. Deb Pettid, co-founder and creative director of the Rabbit Hole, said they also considered how visitors could engage with the space and if students worked together as a team.
She said she hopes students look at books differently after the experience.
“Maybe they're going to think about how that creator is trying to engage the reader, and then how that can be translated into a three-dimensional world,” Pettid said. “But all of them, they thought about accessibility. They thought about pathways. They thought about material use. They thought about all these concepts that are really an important part of design.”
Pettid said the museum did a much smaller version of the design challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic, working with individual families. But she said her team wanted to get involved outside of the museum using their unique skills and resources.
That includes allowing the fabrication team to see how their work is impacting the community by visiting schools.
“It gives them a really great opportunity to inspire kids who might not even know that that's something that they could do,” Pettid said. “You're talking to them about the importance, the value of reading, the value of creating, the value of writing and organizing and thinking in the process, and that sometimes the end result maybe isn't even the thing that was the best part of it.”
Another team from English Landing also chose their book based on the message it would send to visitors. Fourth-grader Kendree’s team based its exhibit on the book “Maddi’s Fridge,” where a child finds out her best friend’s family doesn’t have enough food at home.
“It's about sharing and helping friends when they're silently struggling,” Kendree said. “We hope people learn empathy and to help others when they look like they're struggling.”
Their design represented the different challenges both girls faced in the book, including a fridge and a rock wall that the character Sofia struggles to climb. There are also two levels, including an outdoor scene upstairs that represents when Sofia brought burritos from home for Maddi to eat.
“We showed a slide for funness and we showed the dining table where they would eat food, the fridges,” fourth-grader Kaelyn said. “The characters on the top floor, so you could sit next to them and read, and we also added a mat for safety.”
The group faced some challenges — like having enough paint for all the different colors they wanted to include. They also had to figure out the right material for constructing their rock wall, trying out foam and sponge before deciding on felt.
Blien, another fourth grader on the team, said her favorite part was making the characters from the story.
“I felt like the kids, when they were able to read next to the character, they would actually feel like they're in the book, and like they're a part of the story,” Blien said.
Kevin O'Connor, library media specialist at English Landing, said many of his students were focused on how an audience would interact with their exhibit in real life and how they could invoke the same feelings that their characters went through.
He said it was easy to motivate his students to work on their projects because they’re so inspired. They met every Wednesday morning as a club, but many would come in during recess or take their model home to put in extra hours.
Many of English Landing’s teams either received a special acknowledgment or even won one of the top awards, but O’Connor said they should all be proud of what they’ve accomplished.
Most fourth and fifth graders have moved on from picture books, O’Connor said.
“This gave them a chance to jump back into that world of picture books and think on a deeper level of how they can create something that's never been done before and make a truly immersive exhibit that others can appreciate,” O’Connor said. “They can share these books with the world.”
