What a fantastically fun Friday we had today! Our morning meeting gave us an opportunity to discuss problems we had with our bridges at the end of yesterday and ways to use materials in new ways in order to solve those problems.  Many great suggestions such as tieing craft sticks together with string to make a more stable pier, using straws on the back of our paper to strengthen our roads, tightening our string (cables) so that they were not sagging or lose and using cut pieces of straws to make triangles to use in any needed space that required more stability. Then we jumped right back into our bridge building with our partners. I overheard many good conversations as students were asking and listening to their partner about ideas they thought would work.

The final tests were run on each bridge using our given criteria that a boat had to be able to go under it, a car had to be able to cross it, and it needed to hold at least 15 metal nuts. This was such a success! Can you believe one bridge held 106 metal nuts?!

We enjoyed a brain break reading Rosie Revere, Engineer, which is the story of a young girl who absolutely loved inventing and creating but was very shy and did not like sharing her inventions or ideas with others for fear they would laugh at her. One day, when her great-great Aunt Rose came to visit, she encouraged Rosie to see how her failures were evidence of success.  You will have to ask your child what Rosie invented for her aunt. It was quite spectacular!

After lunch, we discussed the strongest shape(s) to use when engineering a bridge. This led us into our next activity,y which was to build a bridge out of marshmallows and toothpicks. It took quite a bit of self-control for these little engineers not to eat their creations!  This activity guided us into thinking of using triangles to build a truss bridge so that it would be strong and stable enough for the toy car to go through. We had to solve problems as we worked when the builds would lead or droop by using more than one toothpick and/or more than one marshmallow for additional stability and strength. I hope those wonderful bridges made it home in this heat! This final activity took the rest of our afternoon as we were learning to make prototypes and needed to make more than one to have a successful bridge build.

Table Talk:

Thank you again for sharing your students with us this week. I had such a wonderful time teaching and learning with them! Their excitement for education and learning is contagious, and were a joy to work with.

Have a wonderful remainder of your summer!

Warmly,

Mrs. Lett