MOUNT MADONNA SCHOOL
ART & DESIGN
PROJECT BASED LEARNING
CAN WE BUILD A GREENER FUTURE?
Is there a better way to build?
Our freshmen students are exploring the natural resources on our campus, to discover building techniques and materials that are healthier for us, and healthier for the planet.
What if the best way to learn engineering was to get mud between your toes?
Welcome to our natural building project, where 9th graders trade desks for wheelbarrows and spend the year learning to think like engineers, designers, and (occasionally) mud pie connoisseurs.
Students dig into how people across cultures and centuries have built shelter from straw, clay, wood and stone, then get their hands dirty testing those same materials for themselves: mixing cob, stacking straw bales, and figuring out, through trial and a lot of error, what actually holds up through a rainy winter.
By spring, they'll have designed and built real structures on our own school site, alongside architects, builders, and neighbors who've come to lend a hand. It's messy, it's ambitious, and it's a little bit magic: proof, built one blob of cob at a time, that our students are far more capable than they knew, and that the future is something they can shape with their own two hands.
Check back soon to see our progress!
