Room 4 Inquiry - Term 4

To begin I found it challegening to think of ways the children could explore the topic so we decided to use youtube to find videos of christmas parades. From these videos questions started to flow. I quickly found that the children had no idea or concept of what a float is or might be. We found different pictures using the image selection on google of different parts of parades. Using lots of discussion we classified each picture into groups and used language to describe characteristics of each group. From here we slowly formed a clearer picture of what a float is.We chose the group of pictures that we all agreed were floats and made a list of attributes:

1)used car, truck or trailer with wheels
2)ooked like it was floating
3)advertised something

Then we talked about things like saftey and rules for entering a parade. The children helped to create a design breif to use as a guide when we designed our floats.

1)Start from a flat trailer with wheels
2)Think about safety (eg how will kids stay on the float, banners covering wheels is this safe?)
3)School and Christmas themed
4)No Father Chirstmas

From here the children knew where they wanted to go and the ideas began to flow. After brainstorming in groups, sorting ideas and voting on the most popular theme each group had a concept they could work with and use to draw their designs.

The next challenge was getting their ideas off the paper and onto a model. The children struggled with scale and ideas on what sorts of things they could use to substitute for things like christmas trees, mountains etc...

We spent a lot of time discussing equipment, and materials. This required lots of critical thinking and creative solutions.

To present I let the groups go for it and quickly discovered that they were distracted and forgot about their original design. I then had to pull them back and work with each group to regain focus.

Because we spent so much time discussing what a float actually was to apply our knowledge there will be lots of discussion on the day of the parade to see how childrens ideas have changed.