The Rookery

The Herons have taken to our engineering theme with great enthusiasm.  On Monday the students brainstormed a list of famous buildings/locales they were interested in studying and building.  Their list included buildings from every corner of the world, from early civilizations to new construction. The air was full of quick conversions during that brainstorm: AP: "What about the Library of Congress?"  HG: "Oooh, that's a really good one!"  and SC "The really wavy one – I think it's an opera house…"  ED: "Oh yeah, in Australia, in Sydney! We should do that one – it's really cool."  I am always impressed by the knowledge the students have when they work
together as a group. This time the students' familiarity with the location, appearance, and story behind all of these buildings really struck me. 

Today we went to town with Saw-Horse Towers.  Using saw-horses of paper that the kids had folded from paint sample cards, they set out to build the tallest tower they could.  The air was buzzing with amazement at new designs, contemplation of a wavering structure, and shouts of "Look at X!  How did you built that?!".  RC built the first tower with a prism design, AP built the first to require a chair for placement, and many other design and creation firsts followed.  We paused in construction to walk around and observe others' designs.  We talked about the importance of collaboration and building on others' ideas in science and other fields, and several people went back to their own work with modified designs based on their classmates' work.  Some abandoned towers altogether and began creating bridges or strong honeycomb-like structures.

Some towers were destroyed by a breeze from the open windows.  Yet others fell prey to incautious movements around the room.  Yet the Herons reacted with good humor: laughing through the frustration and remaining gentle with each others missteps.    

The Herons drew on the lessons in abstract drawing and proportion taught last week by Keenan (a St. Olaf student) by beginning to sketch sections of their best tower designs in their engineering notebooks.  (Unfortunately we ran out of time to finish this).  They wrote a description of the strengths of their designs – why did that design work?   The building, sketching, and analyzing work was so consuming this afternoon, we all had trouble dragging ourselves away to clean up and go home.