Engineering Lesson

The picture we used during the lesson. 

          This last Tuesday we had our lass class period and last lesson at Brigham Early Learning Center. This class period we split the students up into groups of three or four students and presented our engineering lessons. The Engineering lesson that my group gave was centered around the Next Generation Science Standard:  K-2-ETS1-2.      Develop a simple sketch, drawing, or physical model to illustrate how the shape of an object helps it function as needed to solve a given problem. 

          Our problem was that we could not build a tall tower that would stand. The tower that we were building kept falling over. We needed the students help to build a tower that was tall and could stand by itself. We brought in a picture of different tall buildings for the students to look at. This picture is included in the post. While the students were looking at the picture we had them examine the shape of the towers. The students all said that the towers were larger at the bottom than they were in the middle. We told them to keep this in mind when they were building their own towers. The pictures of the towers we provided also turned in to a little bit of a matching game with the students (this was not planned). They noticed when examining the towers that each colored photo matched with one of the black outlines at the top. Each student took a turn matching the colored photo with its black outline. 

          After we examined the shape of the towers we passed out 15 pipe cleaners and 10 straws to each student and challenged them to build the tallest tower. The students were extremely engaged during this portion of the lesson! I could tell that they each want their tower to be tallest. However, not all of the students understood the importance of it standing by itself. This is why we stopped the students half way through their individual work time and had them look at everyone's towers and what shape or style was working. We told the students that it was not cheating because engineers often work together/share ideas! It was during this time that we talked about how important bases and supports are for towers. We told them the new vocabulary words, explained them and gave them examples in their own towers and in the pictures we provided. This helped the students make their towers taller and stronger.

          Throughout this lesson I did not learn anything new or make any progress towards my original goal. However, I took what I had learned from my pervious times in the classroom to make this lesson plan more engaging and developmentally appropriate for the students. I have learned how important visuals and hands on learning are to English Language Learners. For this lesson we used multiple different learning styles like oral, kinesthetic and visual learning. I think this helped the students better understand what they needed to do with their towers and how important a strong base and supports are. I also think for this lesson it was beneficial to have each teacher work one on one with a student to scaffold their learning while building their individual tower.