Cool constructions

Can you believe it? Our group learning this morning took a new turn. We chatted in our morning meeting time about the constructions and Kai asked us to give feedback on our friends towers/constructions. We compared the towers and noticed that two of them reached the ceiling and one didn’t. The newspaper and tape one reached the ceiling and we taped it to the floor and the ceiling so that it didn’t fall. The K’nex one reached the ceiling because Taiga and Mirai built it higher this morning. They stacked nine chairs and still needed a little help from our teachers. Liezel made sure that the chairs were secure and Mirai and Taiga were safe on them while Kai and Hisami helped pass them the pieces that they needed to build their tower higher. They were challenged at the very end because the sticks were not long enough or they were too long; and then they decided to take a layer off and …………..Yay, they touched the ceiling! What a great achievement. We all clapped and said: “Well done” in both English and Japanese. It was a great feeling. Now we had a dilemma. Was it possible for our con-struction made out of Kapla blocks to reach the ceiling? We were not sure and set about rebuilding it to see if it could. But before we did this, this was our discussion.
Lane: I like the newspaper and tape one.
Kai: What do you like about it?
Lane: I like that it goes up to the ceiling.
Junto: I like the newspaper and tape one too. It’s like there are dif-
ferent floors. One floor is healthy and one is not so healthy, one floor is healthy and one is not so healthy
Shelley: So your idea is that anyone can visit it and choose whether they want healthy or unhealthy food.
Dev: It looks like a shop house.
And so we set about making two groups of construction workers. One group built a new structure with newspaper and tape and the other group built another tower with the Kapla blocks. The newspaper tow-er has not actually been built because Kai wants to build it so that you do not need any tape to secure it to the ceiling. He and his team spent the morning rolling newspaper tightly into tubes. They rolled the newspaper from the corners which was different from the way some of us did it, yesterday. Yesterday we rolled the newspaper from the straight side. The new rolled up newspaper is much longer when you roll it this way. We are not sure what Kai’s plan is and are looking forward to seeing what will happen and how he and his team will build their construction!
Our construction project seems to be taking most of the morning
and we are fully immersed in it. We constantly talk to one another about it and make suggestions about how we can keep the tower from falling over. We had a big problem with the Kapla block tower. We decided to use two blocks for each level and each time we built it substantially high, the entire building collapsed. I think that we re-built it about 5 times; and then we wanted to go to the park so we packed all the blocks away and will try to build it later or tomorrow, again! Taiga and Lane reached the highest spot and then they took chairs to stand on, as they needed to reach even higher and……………...crash!
We spoke about our neighbourhood this morning and what we wanted to do with it. Some of us wanted to take our houses home and other things that we made so our teachers took it apart when we were having lunch. We will all have something in our Portfolios from the amazing “Our neighbourhood” group learning that we did.
We came back from the park all sweaty and with pink cheeks; and prepared for lunch. We were glad that the classroom was cool as it was so hot outside in the park.
We are looking forward to continuing working on our towers/constructions tomorrow and love how busy our classroom is and how active we are. We are continually singing songs in preparation for our graduation and are so excited for the event. Our teachers are doing a lot of behind the scenes preparations too.
Enjoy the beautiful afternoon and see you tomorrow.
Love all the children in Flowers Class.