Engineering: Winter, Week 5

After a couple weeks off, the kids were ready to jump right back into ateliers! This was a short week, but we had a lot of fun. We started with our usual discussion about what towers were, and it was really fun to see the kids making connections between the towers they build in the classroom out of blocks and the "real" towers they see in the outside world. We also had a bit of a conversation about skyscrapers, and whether our school qualified as a skyscraper - some of the kids felt that the school was big enough to count, while others thought a skyscraper should quite a bit taller.

From there, we moved on to Jenga, which we ended up returning to at the end of our time every day this week. We talked a bit about working together to make the highest tower possible, and would discuss which block we thought we should pull out next as we went around the circle. Doing so provided a great opportunity for learning about stability - we were particularly excited about looking for the blocks that were bearing the most weight and trying to keep that load as balanced as possible. All in all, a lot of fun!