​Libertyville Eighth-Graders Bring Elementary Schoolers' Toy Visions to Life

Highland Middle School eighth grade sculpture students are following design dreams of 7- and 8-year-olds in creating new toys that a teacher says could one day sell on the open market.

“Yes, some of their prototypes are that good that they could sell in stores, if it ever got to that,” said Cindi Sartain, the middle school art teacher for Libertyville School District 70.

Sartain and second grade teacher David Meekhof, of Wayne Thomas Elementary School in Highland Park, met at an art show and briefly talked about collaborating classwork. Now in its second year, Meekhof’s students design toys in their heads, write down the requirements, sketch an image or two, and then ship off their requests to Sartain’s Libertyville students.

The project was so popular in North Shore School District 112 that the third of three second grade classrooms joined this year. That made for about 60 designs that needed to be turned into life by Sartain’s 20 middle school students.

“We thought it would be fun to do something outside of the district where Highland students wouldn’t run into their younger siblings or siblings of friends,” Sartain said. “It’s very involved.”

Meekhof’s students come up with the original toy idea and need to describe it in words, draw an image of what it might look like, and select action words that they think would describe the toy. Three pages of thoughts are all the HMS students have to go on.

“This has been an incredible authentic learning project where students have been actively engaged,” Meekhof said. "When a child sees his or her two-dimensional design evolve into a three-dimensional prototype, there is such powerful ownership that can’t be duplicated.”

The final projects will be packed and taken to the Highland Park School this month.

“A recent highlight was when each second grader received a letter from their ‘toy designer,’” Meekof said. “The letters featured updates on the toy prototypes and students responded with letters of their own.”

For the middle school students, they need to consider safety, ensure the toy won’t break on the second or third time out of a box, and be able to fit the final product into a shoe box designed specifically to promote the toy.

“There’s a lot of problem-solving," Sartain said. "The students have to think ahead, think it through. While material to create toys was vast last year, this year, students had to use material on hand, which included papier-mâché, cardboard, tinfoil and other inexpensive supplies."

Students also need to design packaging and think about how they would market the toy.

For Meekhof’s second-graders, “our plan is to extend learning by having students read about toys long ago and comparing them to the toys of today, interview a grandparent or parent about toys they grew up with and reporting in class, create stories with our toys as the main characters, and establish a pricing structure to determine the sales price of our toy designs.”

The above content was provided by Libertyville School District 70. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.