From Boxes to Castle

Boxes and Sticks Inquiry Continued


Inquiry Recap
For the past few weeks, our students have been involved in an inquiry about boxes and sticks.  This inquiry began on one of our nature walks when we collected a pile of sticks.  We then collected a bunch of boxes from our neighbour Ms. Johnston, when she moved into her new classroom.  

Recently, one of our students asked the question, "I wonder how to make a tower from boxes?" 

  A student wrote his question about how to
build a tower from boxes on this whiteboard. 

What a great wonder!  Together as a class we talked about what type of tower to build, and decided on a castle.  We quickly looked at some pictures of castles on the computer and then we made a plan of what to include in our castle.

Once our plan was completed, we selected our boxes and stacked them to look like a castle. 

Just when we thought our castle was complete, someone suggested we paint the castle.  We decided to vote on the colours Purple (my choice), Grey (Ms. Marrella's choice), Blue and Pink.  In order to avoid students voting twice, we decided to give each student a link (toy) to cast their vote.  

As you can see, Ms. Marrella and my colour
choices didn't even come close to winning. 

After deciding on our castle's colour, we talked about who would live in the castle and what else our castle needed.  

Here are some pictures of our students creating the characters and other items for our castle.

Here is our castle!  Though the castle is complete, the fun still continues. Students have enjoyed identifying the 2-D and 3-D shapes that make up the castle.  They have also enjoyed using their imagination to create stories and fairy tales with the characters they have created.

Not a Tube

Our amazing librarian, Ms. Pascot, surprised us one day with a Not A Tube, tube!  Ms. Pascot based this lesson on the books we were using for our Box and Stick inquiry, Not A Stick and Not A Box.

When we used our imaginations, our Not A Tube, tube could be used as... 

 

Below are some picture of us being creative with our Not A Tube, tubes.

 Thank you Ms. Pascot for a wonderfully creative experience! 

Big Stick, Little Stick

Boxes and Sticks Inquiry Continued

We looked at our pile of sticks and picked out the biggest stick and the littlest stick.  Over the past few weeks we have spent some time learning how to measure a variety of objects.  We thought it would be interesting to measure and compare the difference between these two sticks.

First we measured the big stick.  We used some rulers, our Barbie dolls, a few cars, and some wooden blocks.  

We made sure to record our measurements along the way. 

Once we measured the big stick, we measured the little stick.  We learned that we needed to use the same objects that we used to measure the big stick in order to make an accurate comparison. 

Finally, we compared the big stick and little stick.  For example, we noticed that the big stick was five blocks long, and the little stick was one block long.