What is Village?
What are peeps?
A Short Introduction

Village is an educational program for children ages 10-13 in which the participants build a miniature town.  The students' village can have houses, town buildings, a government, money and anything else they think a town should have.  With the teacher acting as a fellow citizen, the children make all the decisions about the town they build.

Village begins with the creation of "peeps" the 3 inch or 8 centimeter tall miniature people who will live in the miniature town.  Each participant makes his or her own peep, which can be anyone: a doctor, a Viking, a basketball player, whoever a child wants to be in twenty years or someone a child knows he or she will never be.
Picture of a student with her peep Picture of a peep village with its residents small and big Picture of two teachers hammering together a peep house
Student with peep, New York Village students in Bobowa, Poland who built a peep town named Orzelkowo Building a house at a Teacher Workshop in Poland
 
Both in the United States and in Central Europe the Village curriculum has been successfully used as a semester-long after-school program, as an in-school interdisciplinary curriculum, and as an educational summer camp.

Village backs up children's classroom education with practice in the context of building a miniature society.  Learning happens naturally as children discover a need for it to achieve some goal.  Running a miniature town deepens chilren's understanding of how the real world community they live in is governed.  Village is ideal instruction in civics for fourth to eighth graders.
 

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Page last updated August 6, 2006