Salvadori Students Connect Housing and American History

Salvadori educator Susan Chea has been teaching 4th- and 5th-grade students at Muscota New School PS 314 in upper Manhattan about the architectural history of their community through an innovative approach that links social studies with model-making, map-reading and field trips.
 
Students visited the Dyckman Farmhouse (c. 1784) to see a Dutch Colonial style residence and the Morris Jumel Mansion (c. 1765) for an example of a stately English home in the classical style. Children then constructed models of the housing types they studied, and by the end of the semester, they will have built a time-lined "village" out of these models, arranging them to give viewers a sense of how housing has evolved in America over the last three centuries.
 
Susan Chea reports that "the children now know how to read Sanborn maps, identify architectural elements and styles, and understand how architecture was transformed from the old world to the new world."