Beautiful Bridges- Monet style

As a culmination to our study on bridges we looked at another artist who was famous for his impressionist style paintings. 1V students had previously studied van Gogh but this time students gained an insight into how Monet used light, shadows, reflections and colour in his paintings. We learnt so many facts about the artist and his style of painting through watching this lovely Inventing Impressionism film.

Monet’s well-known painting Water Lily Pond was chosen as inspiration for our own artworks. The stunning scene and elegant Japanese style arch bridge were perfect subjects for students to dabble with art perspective.

The students used oil pastels to draw their bridges and water lilies, concentrating on the main features and their sizing to create perspective. They then used Edicol dye colours to create a magical watery background.

Their beautiful artworks depict a sense of peaceful serenity and hang proudly in the 1V classroom.

 

Bridging our Communities

In real communities we are constantly faced with challenges and a team of workers is employed to come up with solutions to these problems. We were faced with such an issue in our 1V community. The 1V river was flowing strongly right between our urban and suburban communities. How were we going to safely cross to the other side? What would be the most appropriate product to solve this problem?

We contemplated relying on ferries but decided that this was not the most efficient way for people or goods to cross from one community to another.

The solution….

A BRIDGE

But what type of bridge would we need? Are all bridges created equally?

The 1V students were excited about using the engineering process to design and construct their own bridge that would be able to span the 1V river and be strong enough to transport people and vehicles to the other side.

Students were firstly required to use their prior knowledge about bridges to design a structure that they thought would be suitable for the job. The design criteria was that their bridge structures were to be made only of 30 plastic straws and masking tape. Their finished designs had to be at least one straw length long and half a straw length high off the table. Their designs were not allowed to be secured to the table and had to be able to hold some Unifix cubes.

Designing our bridges

Designing our bridgees

They then set to work building their prototype #1. They had about 40 minutes to engineer their designs and this was challenging. Many students had some good ideas and had started building their designs. Unfortunately at the end of the time there weren’t any structures that held any Unifix cubes.  We were (mostly) deflated but certainly not deterred.

What could we do? We decided that we would need to re-think our designs and see if we could devise a way to make our straw bridges stronger.

Re-thinking our designs

Altering our initial designs

It was time to build prototype #2. The design brief was the same but this time we were a little more successful with building. Quite a few students still found this challenging but some managed to build bridges that were able to actually hold some Unifix cubes. There was excitement in the room! Could we make them even stronger?

We were well on the way to becoming “real” engineers. After a further re-think of our designs, it was then time to build prototype #3.  This was such an amazing session with some fabulous results. Quite a few bridges even held 30 or more Unifix cubes!

It was so encouraging to see many students who had battled with the design challenge process, persevere to finally construct a bridge that worked.

What a wonderfully rewarding experience and such a proud achievement!

We even had a real-life civil engineer who builds bridges come and talk to all of the year 1 and 2 classes about the engineering process of “real” bridge building. He then visited our classroom to view our own straw bridges. He was suitably impressed with our work.

Thank you for visiting, Mr Bent!

Hand in hand with our bridge engineering, 1V students were also working throughout the term on an inquiry-based learning project about bridges. They devised their own inquiry questions about bridges which would help them with their own bridge designs. They worked in teams to investigate the types of  bridges that have been constructed all across the world. They discovered that bridges have different features which enable them to be stronger or more suited for a particular environment. This understanding of the engineering process of “real life” bridges assisted the 1V students with the design and building of each of their own straw bridge prototypes.

What engineering extraordinaires we have in 1V!

Can you reuse that?

Today 1V had the opportunity to go on an excursion to Reverse Garbage at Marrickville. It is an environmental co-operative that is committed to promoting sustainability through the reuse of resources. We discovered a wonderful treasure trove of goodies that would have otherwise ended up in landfill. In fact- they throw NOTHING away! Everything there gets reused.

It was an action packed day. The students enjoyed taking a tour of the factory where they spent time uncovering a vast array of products that had been saved from landfill. What a collection there was! Plastic lids, mannequins, table legs, fabric, furniture, sewing machines, coat hangers, even a HUGE red heart and dinosaur were just a few of the products to be seen. Students were kept busy with a challenge that required them to work in pairs to locate as many different products as they could within the factory and record them on their worksheets.

Students were also involved in a whole class design challenge which required them to work collaboratively to design a bridge from a given set of products. The whole class worked together to design and construct the 1V Swans Bridge. What fun we had and our bridge was pretty amazing too!

The last challenge was to work in teams to build a 3D Big Box City. Each group of students was given a particular building in the urban community that they had to design and recreate out of recyclable materials. The tricky part was that there was no sticky tape or glue! So they had to become quite creative in how they designed and constructed their building. The buildings were all then placed together to become the BIG BOX CITY.

It sure was a very productive day and students now have a greater awareness and understanding of how important it is to reuse products and the benefits it has for our community and the environment.

So before you throw something away think about whether you might be able to REUSE it!

A huge thanks to Max’s mum and Jack’s mum for their assistance today on the excursion.