Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf, Part 2

I am writing several posts about my first adventure into project-based learning.  If you missed Part 1, click here.

Just a reminder of the project’s driving question:

As architects, what is the cheapest house we can build to protect the three little pigs from the Big, Bad Wolf?

Before I started the project, I sent an email to my classroom parents to see if anyone was an architect or if they knew an architect.  I was pleased that one student had a relative who was one.  He lived in another state so we sent him a list of questions about architects and designing a building to protect against the wind.  He was AMAZING! He wrote us back and talked about the role of architect and how one would become an architect. Then he describes “wind loading” and how architects use angles and different roofs to help with wind.  He said  flat, hipped, and domed roofs were best.  On a side note, I learned a lot too. I did not know two terms: wind loading and hipped roof. I love learning new things! My students enjoyed that I was learning with them.

I did not want to tell the students what each roof looked like so during centers, one center was a research center. The students wrote down the terms: flat roof, domed roof, hipped roof and angled edges. They looked for images for each term and drew examples on their notes.  Here are pictures of a few students researching these new terms.  As the saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”  It helped them so much to see examples. I knew this would help them later in their house designs.

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After research, students were introduced to the building material menu and costs.  They were very interested in the materials and started discussing possible building plans right away. Here are a few pictures. Can you tell that they are discussing which materials would be best?

 

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They were beyond excited.  After viewing the material menu, we reread the driving question and then each student worked on designing a house to share with their group the new day.  They were asked to include labels describing which materials they used for each part.  I will share house plans and the group designs along with the math work to show the estimated cost of building the house in the next post.

Click here for Part 3!