VENTURA : Classes Get Lesson in Architectural Taste

The gingerbread version of Ventura City Hall looks a lot like the local landmark--with one delicious difference. The duplicate may be eaten before Christmas by the fifth-graders who built it.

Invited to enter a holiday gingerbread house contest sponsored by the Doubletree Hotel in Ventura, Patti Gudaz’s class at Pierpont School in Ventura took up the challenge with zest.

The made-from-scratch gingerbread base is covered in white icing and has three large green candies on the roof to represent the stained-glass domes in the council chamber’s ceiling.

“The most fun was putting the candy windows in and icing it,” said Molly Wingland, who said she hopes to get to eat some of her work.

Her teacher was delighted with the end product and with how much the children learned from the project.

Gudaz said the children walked to City Hall from the school, took a tour of the building and learned about its history.

The class sketched the building for an art project. As a math lesson, students paced off the length and width of the building and, back at school, transferred the information to graph paper and built their gingerbread City Hall to scale.

The children wrote books about how they made the gingerbread, icing and candy in the school kitchen. “It’s a lot of work, but the children were really proud of themselves,” Gudaz said.

Two other Ventura classes also built local landmarks. Jessie MacLeod’s first- and second-graders at Lincoln School erected a replica of the lighthouse on Anacapa Island. Greta Box’s fourth- and fifth-grade class at Pierpont School spent four days assembling its version of the Ventura Pier, complete with people strolling on it.

“When we made the people, so it wouldn’t be just a pier sitting there without anyone on it, I just gave them marshmallows and candy and pipe cleaners and they made some very clever things,” Box said.

Stacey Nicholson’s second-graders at Poinsettia School in Ventura erected a small version of their school, using pink wafers for the roof tiles, candy canes for the playground equipment and licorice to outline the sidewalks.

Seventh- and eighth-graders at Hueneme Christian School in Port Hueneme helped decorate a 19-foot-high gingerbread house built by the Doubletree staff and created two miniature houses of their own.

“It was fun, but hard. The roof kept falling in. It took teamwork,” Essence Shannon, 12, said of the 15-inch-high house she and her friends built.

Students at Saticoy and Elmhurst schools in Ventura also entered the competition.

The confectionary town will be on display through Dec. 21 in the hotel lobby, where guests and community members can vote on the best entries. The top three winners will receive prizes.