House project

 

Over the last few weeks we have been working on a project based on the theme of houses. 

Our starting point was exploring ideas as to why houses are needed.

 

To link with our project we have been learning some memory verses from the Bible.

 

Tabitha's copy work from Joshua 24:15

Nathanael's copy work from Matthew 7:24
 

We also learned Psalm 127:1 and the songs "The wise man built his house upon the rock"

and "As for me and my house."

 

We visited the library to research homes through the ages.

 

A favourite book on this subject.  It shows the same street in different times in history.
The children enjoyed comparing and contrasting the scenes.

 We talked about the different types of housing you can find in our local area; detached houses,

semi-detached, terraced, flats, town houses and bungalows.

We then went on a house hunt, to see if we could find them all!

At the flats

 

A semi-detached house

 

We were very excited to find these Tudor style thatched cottages!

 We looked for similarities and differences in the homes we saw, talked about when we thought they were built and what materials they were made from.  The children especially enjoyed looking at the chimneys, windows and door furniture.

Bramall Hall

 We talked about the town we live in and where our favourite places are.

 

This is a lovely book, which is a good introduction to maps.

 Inspired by this book, Nathanael and Tabitha drew maps of their bedrooms and a map from our house to the park.

 

 

We carried out an investigation into the best materials to use for windows and discussed the differences between transparent, translucent and opaque.

 

Nathanael testing his window.

  

 We carried out another test to find the strongest way to build brick buildings. We tried building two different bonds (patterns of building the bricks) with Duplo and then threw a ball at each wall in turn.

We discovered that buildings with overlapping bricks were much stronger than ones with bricks placed on top of each other without an overlap.

 

 

 The children designed their own ideal house...

 

and built houses from clay

 

 

 

and from cardboard boxes.

The 'junk' houses incorporated into a Duplo game.

 Inspired by these two books we read, we painted some lighthouses.

 

 

 

 

Abigail and Nathanael's lighthouses.

 

 The project has generated lots of ideas for story writing.

Nathanael's books.

 

To incorporate maths into our project, we learned about odd and even (in the context of house numbers) and made a graph of the number of doors, windows, chimneys etc. in our house.

 

We have thoroughly enjoyed this project on houses and have already started our next topic on Cowboys (at Nathanael's request!)