Our focus this term for Inquiry is Push and Pull. For 1BP and 1RPH, this lined up with our writing focus of the Three Little Pigs.

Once we became really familiar with the story, the students in 1RPH and 1BP were set a challenge! They had to put themselves into the minds of the three little pigs, and design and build a house to stand up against the BIG BAD BLOW-DRYER.

During our writing sessions we created a design for our house and recorded the list of materials we would need. The options for this included playdough, straws, toothpicks, and tubes.

From this, the students created their physical houses, adapting them as they built to make sure it was as strong as possible. Some students showed great resilience and determination as they worked throughout writing, action station time, and even chose to spend their play time restructuring and building their houses. It was amazing to see how hard the students worked on their houses.

When it came time for our inquiry lesson, we had two of our students who acted as a ‘Big Bad Wolf’ but they had created their own rocket launches to try and push down the houses. Isaiah and Kavnick had taken their knowledge from our Push and Pull lessons and the visit from Richard the Scientist, to design and build rocket launches from straws, sellotape, toothpicks and match sticks. They spent a couple of days working out how to make the most powerful and reliable launches.

Each student who made a house was invited up one at a time to face Isaiah and Kavnick’s rocket launcher and then the big bad blow dryer! We used our prediction skills to decide whether or not the house would remain standing.

Isaiah also contributed a variable to the experiment by adding the big bad blow dryer would blow the houses down if it was closer to the houses.

The big bad blow dryer had two strengths and the houses were tested with both. Most houses did stand up to the big bad blow dryer but it was also very special to see the great sportsmanship between students if a house wasn’t able to stay standing.

Through this experience, not only have students developed their understanding even more on push and pull forces, but also on the design process of creating an experiment.