Little Wonders Builders

With all the excitement from planning the building of our bridge, we needed a tool box filled with tools to help us practice our building and measuring skills!

We found the leveler and started using it around the room.  Kiersten checked all the areas in the room to see if she could get the bubble to stay in the middle of the two black lines..........

"This is level!"

Next for the measuring tape..................

We needed to measure every table, chair, toy, person, basically anything we could get our hands on......

We loved the flash light!  We were so excited to shine the flashlight on these snowmen and see their shadow on the wall...

As our class time continued, we started talking about how to build the boat that we found in this book.  Mateo and Alexandre built it with legos, and we put it in water to see if it would float.  We didn't like how the lego ship kept falling to its side, so we got a big box full of recyclables for us to put together to build our boats. 

Some of us used wood and corks.....

Some of us needed Ms. Ambreen to "hot glue" our materials together.......

Some of us used Styrofoam take out boxes!

Milk cartons worked well too..........

We were so focused while we built!

We drew pictures of our boats, sounded out and spelled the names of the boats, and told our friends about all of the things our boats could do.

One day, we even used our "imagination" to go sailing in "Kemah" on these two boats!  We drew fire breathing dragons on the boats!

As the children continued to build and measure, some of the children were measuring each other and saying, "you are 47 pounds long!"  The teachers in the room used this as a starting point to investigate the difference between pounds and inches!

The children started going to "work" every day.  We have been making business cards with our names, phone numbers, and company names.  We are making signs for our businesses.  And on this one particular day, the boys filled up the tool box with their "work stuff" and went off to work to "fix a building"!

We asked where the building was, and we didn't have one, so we went to the block area and started building.

We measured the building.........

We used the measuring tape and saw that the tip of the building was on the 22.

Hmmm so was that 22 pounds or 22 inches????  The children are now understanding the difference.  Mateo said "inches".  We asked, "which word says inches"  He sounded out the words and wrote 22 inches on his "work paper".

Then they looked at the "map" to the next house!

We told them that it didn't say "map" on it, so we didn't know it was the map.  We all worked together to sound out map and write it on the paper.  Alexandre said he had an "a" in his name too, so Bishop spelled map and put an extra A for Alexandre! ;0)

(Can you see MAAP)

As the boys pulled out the tiles for "work", they said this was the kind of house they needed to make.  At this point more children wanted to join in on this project.  A couple of the children said, "You can't!  You don't work with us!"  This brought on a wonderful discussion about people who work together.  We thought we should make a work list so we knew who was going to work that day.  The children started to help each other spell their names on the "work list".

After we had all of the names on the list, Jaxon took the list and had all of the children listen for the roll call!  He said, "Okay, if you hear your name say 'CHECK'"!  (not "here", but "check")  We loved that!!!!!

When we knew who was working, Mateo and Kiersten went to the "office" and typed in all of the information in at the computers.

Alexandre counted all of the tiles for us......

And now, everyday, we make a new work list to see who is going to work.

But because we are building houses, the children said they needed bricks to make a strong house.  The next day we brought bricks, and the children lined them up to count how many we had.

We all took turns counting.  We had 20 bricks.  Trevor wrote the number 20 and Ricky spelled bricks.

Then it was time to measure how long the line of 20 bricks was..........

Wow!  It went all the way to the end of the measuring tape!  It was 144 inches!  We had to write that down too!

Then we started letting our creative juices flow, and we got to building!

Tirza made this house!

The boys made this house, and some of them really posed for the picture!!!!!

We got print outs of what we built, and we started drawing pictures of them.

Tirza counted five circles inside of her bricks.  So she wrote the number 5 below each brick.  She is so proud of her picture that we hung it at the entrance for everyone to see!

Tirza even helped Jennifer with her numbers, their favorite number that day was 2!  So they both cheered each other on as they practiced writing their numbers!

Kyle worked so hard on getting the sticks to line up perfectly in the bricks to make a bridge!  When he was successful, he was so so proud of himself!  Look at the smile on his face, it makes us smile too!

This is a scary bug house in Mexico!  The reason the children said it is in Mexico, is because we read the label on the brick and it says MEXICO!!

A house of bugs would not be complete with out spider webs!  Trevor said, "Now my brain is working!  We can use string to make spider webs!"

The team work is wonderful to see!

Luke made his own special  house!

Tad ah!

Some of the girls used the scale to measure how heavy the water colors were.  This was great for them to continue to learn differences in measuring.  They put each color on the scale, spelled the name of the color and recorded their weight.

Any time Kylie didn't know how to write something, Ashley was right there to help her spell and write her letters.

We looked at our records, and talked about what color was the heaviest, and which was the lightest.

We gave the children wood days after the bricks to see how they would use them in the project, and we are now taking the project in so many different directions!

We made a birds nest!  And then Ashley said, "what do birds eat?"  After some research, we found out they eat bugs!  We had some "bug blocks" in class, so we made a nice plate of bugs and but it in the nest for the baby birds.

The children said that it was going to be a humming bird nest.  We sounded out "humming bird" and Trevor wrote it on the chalk board for us.  Then we used the computer to do a search on humming birds.

We found it!!!!!

Phoenix used a stick to make a caterpillar!

Joshua made a "train conductor's house", "that is where the conductor lives when he is driving the train!"

Looks good doesn't it? 

There is so much going into this project!  It has already continued on so much more than this blog posting!  Feel free to ask Maryam or Ambreen questions, or let us know if you have suggestions on materials that may help us inspire our children!