Room 3 Float on By

This unit created a lot of excitement amongst the children in the class. However, being technology based, I found a few challenges initially, in that the children had great ideas but the practicality of them working on the back of of truck, with very little assembly time, was a difficult concept for some of them to grasp. We began our explore and find ideas by using google to look for christmas float ideas and then just float ideas and what was it the School wanted as its theme. There were two major trains of thought in the end, first a Christmas scene, the other School based. This generated asking questions about how we would sell our school, and what were the most dominant aspects of Christmas. As some where confused as to where they wanted to go with these ideas 4 groups emerged. 2 out of both having Poroutawhao school and Christmas combined, 1 solely Christmas and 1 solely school.
The ideas from their individual concepts where then combined to come up with one group idea for which they would use as the blue print for their construction of the float on their tissue box. The children really enjoyed the making of the float athough there was difficulty with actual overall realitivity of size according to their design and fitting it on a tissue box.
I enjoyed firstly hearing the delegation of jobs within the groups, and then the discussions, sometimes needing to be resolved by my intervention but mostly their own strategies to create something that was agreeable to all members of the group.
The children were all very pleased with their group floats and saw positive aspects in all presentations. A successful unit for us in many ways.