Tape, laughter and a massive amount of newspaper surrounded Harry Toulgoat’s class of fifth-grade students at Hillcrest Elementary School Wednesday.
The class has been working on a math unit about area, perimeter and volume and Toulgoat decided to give his students some hands-on engineering experience to make the lesson memorable.
“We’re learning how to do area and perimeter and trying to make a 3-D object,” said student Kailye Collier.
Approximately 2,300 sheets of newspaper, feet and feet of tape and plenty of teamwork later, the class erected a structure consisting of hundreds of joined newspaper tubes made out of the Whidbey News-Times. Students stood on chairs to hold up walls taller than themselves as other students climbed inside the structure with tape. Laughter and excitement were everywhere as the students enjoyed the hands-on work.
“We got math going on even through we’re building things,” Toulgoat said.
He got the idea for the project from a Seattle school that did it last year. He divided the class into teams, each of which created more than 300 newspaper tubes using nearly a mile of the local newspaper. Then the groups got to work following blueprints, figuring out how to tape tubes together and learning how to measure the diagonals of triangles, Toulgoat said.
Students learned about math, as well as using time efficiently, writing and reasoning.
“Teamwork, the geometry of engineering, area, perimeter and volume are most important, even if it collapses,” Toulgoat said.
Although the structure didn’t stand on its own, that didn’t dampen the students’ enthusiasm or education. After discussing what worked and what didn’t, the class constructed two-person tents that are still standing, Toulgoat said. The students invited their second-grade reading partners to sit in them during reading time.
About their first structure, student Ceirra Dean said she learned, “Newspaper doesn’t work very well to make a 3-D object.”
Student Piper Fisher learned that, “When you work on a project like this, you should have more tape.”
“And harder newspaper,” Dean added.
“But we used teamwork and that’s all that matters,” Collier said.
“We learned, and that was the whole point,” Toulgoat said.
