Inquiry updates (HTWW)

As additional provocations to our unit of inquiry How the world works last week, the children immersed into books (narrow reading) about construction, bridges, building and design. 



This activity provoked some rich conversation about design and safety.

While looking at the book City Homes, by Nicola Barber, Emma commented, "This book talks about houses. These houses are different sizes and shapes." 

Sam was interested in the book Machines in Construction, by Caroline snow. He said, "This book talks about buildings and people are building the house with a hammer."

Chinsiv commented on the book she was looking at called Villages and homes, by Nicola Barber. She noted, "This book is about some houses made of mud and some made of brick and leaves and I saw a map."

In addition, they listened to the story 'The Three Billy Goats Gruff' and viewed a short video called Elmo's World - Building things. They were then presented with pop sticks and tape with the objective to work together in pairs to build a Billy Goats Bridge. It was amazing to see how they set to work thinking they were working collaboratively, but really all but one pair worked side by side, but not together. 

 









As a follow up the next day we took a close look at the 'bridge' that was built collaboratively by Hifumi and Angel in comparison to the other 'bridges'. They looked at the following photo and the Hifumi and Angel explained how they worked. Angel said, "I hold and Hifumi stick and I stick and Hifumi hold it." Hifumi said, "I make it the bridge I make it with Angel. Make it stronger."

 

It seemed like the penny dropped at that moment and the intrinsic motivator switches were flick on. The children partnered up and started to work. 





As they worked a youtube video of 'Amazing Bridges Around the world' played in the background. This caught two students attention and they asked me to pause the video. They wanted to make a bridge like the one they saw. "Do you think you could draw a plan of what you think it could look like?" I asked them. They set to work without missing a beat :) Soon after others recognised the benefit of 'design first' and decided to draw. Some were able to refer back to their design as a prompt to continue their work, while others left it as a stand-alone noted idea. 

  


This experience offered so much space for communication, social, research, and thinking skills development, as well as lots of fine-motor practice. How to use the tape was a major learning curve for all the children during the exercise. 

Once the bridges were thought to be done we sat down together to reflect. We talked about strength, weight and stability. We remember some of the things we learned in Ms Karyn's lesson about weight too. 

As a soft introduction to rubrics, we also discussed what a good, great, and excellent bridge might look like. The children set off again to reflect with their partners and judge whether they thought their bridge was finished and good as is, or whether it could they make it better. 

Was their design, when suspended, strong enough to hold one, two, or more toy animals? 

Our first bridges looked like this:

...and our final products looked like this:

Stay tuned for our learning reflections :)