COEUR d'ALENE - Candy canes, malt balls, gummy bears and drops, All stuck to graham crackers, on sides and on tops, Of milk cartons covered in frosting with care, Made winter villages for Sorensen students to share.

The sweet aroma of vanilla icing filled Melissa Mello's special education resource classroom Thursday in Sorensen Magnet School of the Arts and Humanities as her students and some helpers toiled to build a magical holiday scene.

The students crafted graham-cracker "gingerbread" houses and wintry backdrops to create festive tabletop villages. Mello and her students invited the whole school to take a tour Friday to enjoy the holiday magic before scampering for winter break.

"I'm really actually excited because I like being in this class," said fourth-grader Kiki Warner, 10, of Coeur d'Alene. She cut construction paper pine trees to add to the backgrounds, which consisted of black paper attached to cardboard and set upright. She and a classmate also counted sparkly, glow-in-the-dark stars to distribute between the night skies of the three little wonderlands.

Kiki said she enjoys participating in artistic projects at school and showed off the gingerbread house she made, complete with candy canes on the roof and gummy bears on the sides.

"It was really fun," she said. "I also helped some first-graders make their gingerbread houses. I helped my own little reading buddy."

Mello said about 40 students, kindergarten through sixth-grade, contributed to the project. It is her first year at Sorensen after teaching at Pathways, and she wanted to share a special family tradition with her Sorensen students.

"Making these gingerbread houses has been a family tradition that I've done since I was little," she said. "It's like, 30 years we've been doing this with my family. So this year, I thought it would be really fun to do this with my students here at Sorensen, and my assistants were completely on board."

She said the school did something similar in the library several years ago.

"So we said 'let's do that again,'" Mello said. "It's been very enthusiastic. Any time you get kids with candy around Christmastime, it's always a festive thing. We thought we were going to run out of frosting, but we actually had to say, 'No, you need more frosting; think of it as the glue and the mortar of your building.'"

Special education para-pro Linda Hamm of Coeur d'Alene has been at Sorensen 17 years and remembers when the library hosted the winter village experience. She smiled warmly as she assisted students and shared her thoughts.

"I feel that it's a true blessing to see the fun that they have to be creative," she said. "We've turned some of it into a math project, so that was helpful in the academic part of it. I just love working with the kids and seeing them enjoy a fun project like this. It makes it special for them."