click on the links above to jump to each page

Children's Folk Activities

Children Learn the Building Arts

Kids love to build! Be it a sandcastle, a wall out of building blocks, elaborate clubhouses, hideouts, dollhouses or forts, they experiment with building structures though play.  Children may apprentice by helping adults with homebuilding projects.  They learn to hammer, cut, put things together, and take things apart.  The art of building a good play space is seeing the possibilities of new uses for household items such as blankets and tables, and in discarded, scrap materials.  Kids are avid recyclers; they scrounge fou good building materials. They make their own personal play spaces in basements, garages, backyards or living rooms.

Traditional Crafts Tent
How do you make a dollhouse out of old scraps and boxes? Can you make a fort out of pillows and blankets? Try some building activities, such as making playhouses, mosaics, windmills, and blueprints. Make something to take home and share with your friends!

Fort-Building Area
In this area, festival visitors can build a real kid’s fort! Use your imagination and the scrap materials in the festival’s supply closet to construct a fort of your very own design. If you let your imagination go wild, you could even continue with a fort already built or start one from scratch. You can chose to build an indoor or outdoor fort.

Special Demonstrations
In these roving demonstrations, kids can explore their own folk traditions by sharing their own customs and techniques. Craftspeople from the program “Masters of the Building Arts” will demonstrate their building skills for kids. Youth artists will also be on hand to show their special talents in building walls and forts.

About Children’s Traditional Culture . . .
Most of children’s culture is traditional. Even in infancy, children begin participating in and learning traditional games, such as peek-a-boo and patty-cake. Throughout childhood and adolescence, they participate in traditional learning songs, rhymes, sayings, puzzles, rituals, customs, and games with their peers, older youth, and adults. Although adults are important teachers for children, much of children’s traditions are passed on from child to child; children are both the teachers and learners.

About This Year’s Featured Demonstrators . . .

Katherine Bosetti
Oxford, Michigan
Building Walls

At her rural Oakland County home, fifth-grader Katherine Bosetti keeps chickens. She also helped build the chicken coops. For her 4-H FOLKPATTERNS project last year, she learned how to make cordwood and masonry walls, hoping to incorporate these skills into another chicken coop for her family. She demonstrated building a cordwood wall at the Oakland County 4-H Fair and won first place. She is hoping to use her wall-building knowledge to construct other things. She will demonstrate the process at the festival.

Gavan Lienhart & John Jess
Haslett, Michigan
Building Forts

Gavan and John build forts and clubhouses with other friends throughout their semi-rural neighborhood. Their latest creations are in their backyards: one in a large hole, and the other in and around an old woodpile. Building a fort takes time. Gavan and John look for appropriate discarded items and natural materials to incorporate into the forts. They carefully scrape bark from cordwood for “building bark.” Wood and branches work well, as do old doors and bedsprings. Most of the fun for them is in the building of the fort, but it’s fun to play inside them too. Outside the school bus stop shelter at their home, Gavan and John are creating what they call “the sanctuary,” a windbreak out of tree limbs, as “a memorial to the trees that lost their lives in February 2002” when people with chainsaws took off low tree branches and “disabled us from climbing the trees.” Gavan and John will help festival visitors create their own forts.