Fairy Tale Eningeering

While we've been spending a lot of time focusing on Fairy Tales in Reader's and Writer's Workshop, we've also begun to learn about the Science behind our stories!

Red Riding Hood's Zipline

One of our first fairy tale science experiences was creating a zipline from Red Riding Hood's House to her Grandmother's house to help her avoid the Big Bad Wolf! 

Each giraffe team had five materials to choose from (clay, paper, paper clips, butterfly clips, and rubber bands) but they could only use three of those materials to create their contraption to connect Red's basket to the zipline. After designing and creating their contraption, each group had two turns trying to get the basket down the zipline, and after their first try they had the option to change their design to make it more successful

While every group built a successful contraption, our most efficient contraption got down the zipline in 0.97 seconds! Sorry, Big Bad Wolf, but you're going to have to find your food elsewhere!

Cinderella's Wind-Powered Carriage

Later that day, we went to Mrs. Healey's room to design and create a wind-powered carriage for Cinderella out of paper! Afterwards, we got to test our designs and adapt them to make them even faster

As you can see, testing was our favorite part :)

Growing Jack's Beanstalk

On Tuesday, we got to plant some beans that we hope will grow into big, beautiful beanstalks just like Jack's!

After soaking the seeds to start the germination process, we each created our own castle planters and we planted two seeds in each of our pots. 

We hope our beans will begin to sprout soon, and we look forward to more Fairy Tale Science fun with Ms. Donlon and Ms. Bucklin in the weeks to come!

Red Riding Hood's Zipline

This week, we began rotating classrooms once again, this time, for fairy tale-themed STEM projects! On Wednesday, we started off in our own classroom creating a contraption Red Riding Hood could attach to her basket and put on her zipline from her house to her grandmother's house so she could avoid any other run-ins with the Big, Bad Wolf! 

Each table group had to choose 3-5 materials to build their contraption. They could choose from modeling clay, tape, binder clips, paper clips, butterfly clips, rubber bands, and brass fasteners, and it had to be able to attach and detach from both the zipline and the basket. 

Each group decided on their materials and got to work with designing and building their contraptions.

After we built our first model, it was time to test. Some of us found our contraptions were successful while others needed some improvements.

Some of the materials were great for weighing down our baskets to carry them more quickly down the zipline, but others caused a lot of friction on the string itself and made for a snow, bumpy ride to Granny's house

Even if we weren't successful the first time, we didn't let it disappoint us! We saw the changes we needed to make and brought those ideas back to our table groups when we made our design revisions.

After about 5 minutes of revisions, we tried our our new designs on the zipline!

victory hugs!

During our second run, everyone's time and distance improved. ALL of our contraptions made in down the 6 ft. zipline and they all did it in less than 2 seconds!! 

trial one on the right, trial 2 on the left

While it was awesome to see everyone succeed in the second trial, it was even more amazing to see how well everyone worked together on this experiment. Everyone truly worked together as a team and made sure everyone's ideas were valued, and even when ideas didn't work, we learned from them and thought about what we could change to make it better. We celebrated all of our victories together, and we had so much fun while we did it :)