Three Little Pigs Houses

Jenin’s kindergarten class spent a couple of weeks working on fairy tales and nursery rhymes.  One of the ideas the teacher and I decided on was for the students to recreate the three little pig houses.  We took inspiration from this project seen online.  The students were split into three groups to complete the houses.

Can't resist these little piggies

Materials to create the houses:

• Three boards of foam core
• Exacto knife or razor blade
• straight edge

Draw out a basic home design in the middle of the foam core board. Include a couple of windows and a door, if desired. To make the home as large as possible, I drew the roof top to reach the top of the board.

Using your exacto knife, cut out the home.  Use a self healing mat or other protective surface beneath the board.

To create a home that stands on it’s own, keep the board on the sides of the house intact. Score (cut through, but not all the way) the front of the house.  This will allow you to bend the side pieces back to create a stand.  Score the door as well.  Depending on wether you want the door to open in or out will dictate if you score it from the front of back.  Fully cut out your windows.

Using your newly cut out home as a template, trace the home onto the other boards. Cut as directed above.

To decorate the three houses:

• hay or dry, wild grass (cut from the side of the road)
• small sticks (found these in our backyard and around the school grounds)
• red construction paper, crumbled for texture and cut into rectangles  
• Glue sticks, traditional glue, and glue guns

Straw house:

Using a lot of glue all over the foam core, have the children press the straw firmly into the glue.  Glue sticks will not work for this step.  Continue to add glue and straw as needed.  While it’s drying, trim some of the excess straw to show the shape of the house.  If desired, have the children color or paint the board a pale yellow prior to gluing the straw. (Clean up as much of the straw as possible off of the floor. Otherwise the janitor will hate you.)

Stick house:

Using a glue gun, glue small sticks to the board.  Break sticks to fit into smaller spaces and to avoid having them come up and over the edge of the boards.  Be sure not to glue over the line where the home will bend to stand on its own.  If you’d like, prior to gluing the sticks, have the children paint or color the board brown to minimize the amount of white showing.  Alternatively, glue the sticks closer together to minimize gaps.  After the sticks were glued down, I just scribbled in between the sticks with a brown crayon. 

While a low heat glue gun is safest for the kindergarteners to handle, it took much longer and didn’t work as well.  Supervise the children while using a high heat glue gun.  We found the best method to be one child to squeeze out a line of glue on the board, while another pressed a stick down from the top immediately.

Brick house:

Have children crumble a couple sheets of red construction paper.  This will give a bit of texture to the home.  (Ideally, I would have used sand paper painted red. Unfortunately time didn’t permit.) Have children cut out rectangles.  Using glue sticks, glue “bricks” onto the board.  If you’d like a more uniform stacked brick look, have the kids stagger the rectangles. 

We would have liked to decorate the homes as seen in the inspiration project, but again, time didn’t allow. 

Our finished houses.