On Wednesday I featured the final episode of Huell Howser’s California Mission series; early in the show he visits a fourth-grade classroom to meet the kids and have a look at their mission models and artwork.

Back in 1980, my mom was working with a fourth-grade Montessori class when they did their California Mission unit, and she was able to shoot photos of their progress as they built their model. Instead of using shoe boxes, they used clay bricks for their construction material. Unfortunately, the bottom part of all these images was blacked out, so I’ve cropped them and used a few filters to try to bring out the details a bit better.

Molding the clay

Building the bell tower