Welcome back to school-age 3! We started the year off with a sturdy foundation (if you don’t mind the housing pun, and soon you’ll know why!). It started when Brielle mentioned she wanted to draw her “dream house”, sketching out the rooms, floor plan, and even making a working elevator by cutting a slit in the paper and sliding in a rectangle piece that moved up and down. We have been working on houses ever since.
We began with magnet tiles, as some of our children continued where they left off last year making mansions for their games with Lego characters. We also introduced acrylic balloon dog characters that were implemented into their play as well as the children designed and built dog houses for them.
The next day, we brought in cards to work towards more building. While not everything we built were houses, the concept was there, and we still had fun building and experimenting. Many of us learned that for cards, triangles seemed to be the most structurally sound for building. Others chose to try out squares, as the buildings they wanted to build were square in theory; turns out we needed extra supports to make squares work! This trial and error has been great for our problem-solving skills, as well as our critical thinking.
Soon we got to work on blueprints for an even bigger building project involving cardboard and everyone’s favourite fastening material: hot glue. This continued our focus on structures, which is what our group appears interested in, by providing them with a bigger medium to build with. We are so grateful that we get to have such a fun project to undertake so early in the year! Everyone’s vision of the perfect building is a little different and we are excited to see each and every one of these perfect buildings!
