Borderland

This is the last week of the academic year. Next week I return to my domestic life in the country - full time. I become a fixer of toilets, a killer of ants, a builder a bike racks, a gardener, and a soccer fan. I also plan to read and take naps in the hammock. Long strenuous bike rides are also on the agenda. No university courses. I’m credited-out.

School this week was set up with two full days for Monday and Tuesday, and three shortened days, Wed-Fri. The special programs teachers had a field trip for their students on Monday, so I had a reduced class size. I didn’t want to generate any more graded work for only part of my class, and I didn’t want to write the day off either. So I pulled an old idea out of my repertoire of old ideas.

Kids use newspapers (which I still have a lot of) to build a tower high enough to touch the ceiling. I showed them how to use a pencil to roll the paper into a tubular dowel. We remove the pencil from the tube, tape the tube, and repeat until there are enough to join into a frame for a structure.

Some of the structures used quite a bit of tape.

Each team had 3-4 kids, and a roll of tape. I did tell them that triangles might be stronger than rectangles, and I encouraged them to use scissors to make their dowels the same size.

The project typically takes a day, or the better part of a day, for fourth-graders. Cooperation and planning play a critical part in the group’s success. My experience has been that the kids develop a good sense of structural dynamics after they watch the rectangles collapse, and discover the benefits of triangular bracing.

See pictures and story on the student site. It’s messy problem-based learning that works well for a time when you don’t need to be too serious about the outcome.

I found this activity in an old dusty book in our school library a few years ago. The book is long-gone, and I don’t know the name of it. All I remember is that it came from The Lawrence Hall of Science. Anyone know the book? I’d like to find it again. They have a lot of curriculum units for the physical sciences, and many other topics.

I carry all my best ideas in my hip pocket, and I’m always on the lookout for more.