The Metropolis Project

I used Benoit Tardif's books as the model for the project: Metropolis and Sport-O-Rama.

Source: Amazon.ca and Okanagan Regional Library orl.bibliocommons.com

The concept behind the books is that by using very simple pictures or icons in bright, contrasting colours with minimal text, each page describes the most important features of a city or a sport.

When we looked at the books together, we all agreed that the author probably knows much more about each city or sport then what we see, but after a research he probably chooses the most essential (fundamental) and the most interesting (trivia, fun facts) pieces of information that make it to the final pages.

When students have done their research, they prepare their "Metropolis poster" by selecting the features they would like to showcase about their project. We all start with a clean sheet, which we divide into 32 sections by folding it into half again and again.

Then each student decides about how many features of the topic will be represented on the sheet, how it will be arranged and how large those sections will be. They make a sketch. We suggest that the size of the sections should represent the importance of the feature. They decide about pictures, symbols and other representations. We ask them to include minimal text. 

They start colouring the picture. We soon realized that markers work the best, they make each section pop up. Students enjoy the design-element of the project: choosing contrasting colours, coming up with special features (gold and silver markers were requested).

We noticed that during this somewhat long task, the students go through a deep synthesizing process as well. They carefully choose in what order they would present the sections and what they will be talking about. The completed picture is glued to a dark sheet.

Here are some examples of student work from last year. Each student was able to talk about the topic for about ten minutes, while pointing out sections on their poster. They constantly emphasized and justified why and how they chose the topics that made into the poster and added details that were not directly presented.

(All photos taken by G.D.)

The classroom teacher and I agreed that the project exceeded all our previous expectations. She pointed out that she never saw such deep comprehension and ability to synthesize the compiled information before. Students did not get lost in details, were able to explain their choices, and truly enjoyed that they could use their own design ideas and creativity. Some of them also seemed to be in a zen-like mindset while colouring, which could have helped them processing the information even more.