“Hey
look! There is a castle in the Maker Space!”
Samay
found a castle puzzle with no pieces in it that someone had put in the Maker
Space to recycle. This amazing find became the provocation for our guinea pig
project.
Many
of the students gathered around Samay to look at what he found, and then seemed
to burst into 10 different directions. Some students went and started
immediately building a castle out of wooden blocks, others went to look for the
puzzle pieces that were missing, still others went and found castle books, and
Violet quietly went over to Mango and Oreo Cookie our guinea pigs and stared
intently at them while drawing and writing.
“You
know, Mango and Oreo live in a cage, imagine what they would do in a castle!”
Violet wondered out loud.
“We
should make them a castle like Elsa and Anna live in!” Renee said.
“And
special clothes to dress up in!” Olivia and Scout added.
Again
there was a flurry of activity while students scattered to make a castle, make
clothes for the guinea pigs and watch what the guinea pigs were doing.
“Look
what I drew. Quick! Take a picture of it! Really quick! It’s a race track. The
castle should have a race track.”
Lachlan
had come over from his table to provide his input.
“Yeah,
and a bridge for them to go fast on, right?” said A.J. “We can use these
things.”
In
a couple of minutes, students were using wood, cardboard boxes, cardboard
pieces from the art room and tape to build.
The
students used a lot of tape to hold the materials together, and then tried to
figure out where they could get pictures of race tracks, castles and mazes.
Together we looked for books in the library, printed off pictures that we found
on the internet, and we found videos of other guinea pigs going through mazes. We
then tried using the ipad to film the pigs while it airplayed up on the big
screens (of course there had to be some dancing when the students realized they
could see themselves!) We then had to try the castle/maze/race track with Mango
and Oreo Cookie.
