Art and Engineering Challenges!

Wednesday

Have you ever given directions to someone to make something and the final product turned out different than what you imagined? It's hard to give directions that are clear and concise sometimes! And in kindergarten sometimes it's hard to listen to directions! 

As an engineering challenge, students worked with a partner building with Legos in what I like to call "battleship style." Two engineers had a partition between them. One student was the teller and the other was the builder. After they placed all their Legos, they checked to see if their creation was the same. Wow is it hard! But it was also fun! Check it out in action:

We did have couple of successes!

And a lot of failures!

But we learned a lot about listening and being clear with our words and directions.

Friday

Today with our second  buddies we talked about how artist use shapes in their art. In honor of love and friendship our artists were given the challenge of making an animal out of hearts! They made pandas, butterflies, lions and more! Here is some of the work in progress:

Make sure to keep your eyes peeled for our heart animals to be displayed in the hallway. 

Then in the afternoon, we worked on an engineering challenge. Pairs of students were given a tray of materials: cups, Popsicle sticks and 1 in cubes. In their pair they had to build structures with different challenges. 

Challenge #1: build a sturdy structure with 1 cube as the base.

Challenge #2: using any base, build the tallest structure possible.

Challenge #3: build a structure using 1 cup as the base.

It was such a fun day!

~Mrs. C

Measurement, weather and buddy art!

We have been working on measurement in class. Some of the key words we have been using are length, long, width, tall, height, and short. 

Here we are lining up from tallest to shortest:

This week we are moving on to talk about weight. We will be discussing lighter and heavier. 

In the world of weather we made rain gauges to measure rain over the course of several days. Here are some meteorologists checking their rain gauges and recording their findings:

We also had our first art lesson with our second grade buddies! We learned about lines and patterns and then used crayon and water color paint to show our learning.

~Mrs. C

Ground Hogs Day!

According to Punxsutawney Phil spring is on its way! We learned about how on Ground Hogs day, Phil comes out of his burrow to see whether spring is on its way or if we will have a longer winter. 

Then I gave the class an engineering challenge. I wanted to see if they could build something that would prevent Phil from seeing his shadow so that every February 2nd he would predict an early spring.

We discussed the engineering process and how each table needed to work as a team and then they got started! 

Here are the engineers planning their design:

And then starting the building:

Finally some groups found a way to prevent Phil from seeing his shadow:

Some groups are still building but the class loved this challenge! I can't wait to see what they come up with for the next engineering challenge!

~Mrs. C