By JAIME STUDD

For the Express

PERTH — Students in Dianne Magliocca’s fourth-grade class at Broadalbin-Perth Intermediate School learned some unique, but important, lessons recently—not the least of which is that nothing is trash.

The students transformed a haunted house, built by Cindy Hartney’s first-grade class at The Learning Community and slated for the trash following Halloween, into an extremely decorative — and nearly entirely edible — winter wonderland.

Magliocca said the project not only teaches students that objects can be reused for other purposes, an important environmental lesson, it provides them with a cooperative learning experience that can be carried with them throughout life.

“In society, they need to be able to work in a group dynamic,” said Magliocca. “That was my focus.”

The students were divided into small groups, each of which were assigned a particular area to work on. Magliocca said team-oriented, project-based learning experiences like the Winter Wonderland project require students to employ critical planning, organizational and problem-solving skills.

The students, 25 in all, worked on the project for nearly three hours over the course of two days, and all agreed the it provided them with some very valuable lessons.

“I learned that organization is the key,” said one student.

The students, ranging in ages from 9 to 11, also seemed to have learned how to navigate difficulties and make the most out of the experience. Each had a different idea of what the most difficult part of the project was — the roof, the log cabin, the frosting, the cotton ball lawn — but they all shared an exuberance and enthusiasm for the project itself.

After scraping the original haunted house down to the bare cardboard, the students applied approximately 17 tubs of frosting and untold numbers of Twizzlers, mints, candy canes, Kit Kats, M & M’s, Starbursts and cookies. The marshmallow snowmen were contributed by students from a second-grade class.