BENTONVILLE - Five dollhouses will grace nonprofit organizations in the community, thanks to math students at Lincoln Junior High School.
The dollhouses were unveiled Thursday night during the school's annual Math Night, an evening for parents and students to visit the school, play games that involve math lessons and demonstrate what the students have learned lately. Throughout the school year, the school has events to celebrate each core subject area.
Teachers Jayna Moffit and Jennifer Coaten's math students created the dollhouses, each of which had a theme. The students then were allowed to decorate each room in the house according to the overall theme, Moffit said.
Following are the five house themes and the houses' destinations • "Community House"will go to the Children's Library at the Bentonville Public Library • "A Home to Give Back"will go to Habitat for Humanity of Benton County • "Home of the Big Cats"will go to the Bentonville School District • "Where a Kid Can Be a Kid "will go to the Northwest Arkansas Children's Shelter; and • "A House of New Beginnings"will go to the Benton County Women's Shelter.
The school custodians built the dollhouses, and the advanced art students painted the houses' exteriors, Moffit said. The math students then decorated each individual room. That's where the math lesson came in. Each group had to create a detailed blueprint of the house; develop a cost list for all items in the house; place those costs in categories; and determine what percentage of the group's budget was spent on each category. The students also created graphs depicting details of their projects.
"We wanted a project that would make them think outside the box but also have them be part of the community," Moffit said.
Eighth-grader Hannah James worked on the house that will be given to the children's shelter.
"It was fun because we got to make something that's usually not done in school," she said. "It was stressful having to work with people who all had different tastes."
The Math Night also featured games and other lessons created by the students. Tyler Jones played math games with his father, Jeff Jones. The seventh-grader also got to show off the story he had written for his class's "mathematical fiction"project. He wrote a story about how math took over the world, Tyler Jones said.
His father appreciated the opportunity to see his son's school.
"It's good interaction between the families and the school," he said. "It's good for parents to take advantage of the opportunity, and it helps me understand what he's learning."
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