Egg Drop Success

I like doing group projects with my kiddos because it's something that they definitely could use some practice with. We decided to do an egg drop competition-I asked parents to send in recycled items like cereal boxes or fabric scraps, etc. I chose 6 team leaders and let them choose their teams (some were very wise and considered what materials those students brought to the table :). Then I turned them loose to work on a blueprint for their model.

The next day I let them begin constructing. About 5 minutes in I texted my GT Coordinator to see if she was busy, because I really wanted to share the "buzz" that was happening in our classroom with someone. They were all cooperating together, discussing why they thought this material should go here, why maybe it shouldn't go here. You heard a lot of statements like "I have an idea".They were testing their prototypes--"I think a pair of scissors weighs the same as an egg-let's try it out with that" and then the outcome "I definitely think we are going to lose!"--"then how do we fix it?"-it was really one of those amazing moments.

I think some kids probably came to school today just to see if it worked! They were bugging me all morning, asking when we were going to test them. A majority of them did work and we debriefed afterward to discuss what they learned from the experiment if it didn't work-what would they do differently next time. I couldn't tell you what objective this pertains to or what part of my evaluation it fulfills, but I really think they learned a lot from the activity-if nothing else how to work on a team, which we all know is an important future skill! :)