Pocklington Prep Year 2 pupils have enjoyed exploring and creating structures for different purposes, as part of this term's topic - Weird and Wacky!

One of the favourite activities was designing, planning and building a model of a bridge to specific dimensions.  The children had to work in teams and think about how to create a strong, secure structure, using a choice of materials and then evaluate their completed design against a set of criteria. Here are some of the comments from their evaluation:

‘Making the deck was tricky because the lolly pop sticks were fiddly. It was too difficult to make a cantilever bridge with the materials we had’ - Florence

‘It’s hard to discuss with your team and agree on a design but it’s ok to change your design and improve it’ - Jack

‘Making a suspension bridge was tricky so we made a beam bridge’ - Francesca

‘We decided to make our bridge stronger by using triangles’ - Skye

‘To make our barriers not wobble, we added a top to our bridge’ - Pollyanna

‘I gave myself a challenge’ - Tamara

‘I liked working as a team as it was a challenge for me’ - Pollyanna

Year 2 teacher, Mrs Walton said: “There were many different learning outcomes to this project and the children have gained a lot of enjoyment from it, whether it be the actual building of the bridge, or working as part of a team to overcome obstacles.”

She continued: “Setting ourselves challenges and having the courage to have a go at something outside our comfort zone builds resilience in all of us.

“The building bridges exercise was designed to encourage the pupils to listen and be receptive to each other’s ideas. Having the ability to acknowledge this and communicate their own ideas was key at the planning stage and during construction, when the model didn’t work out as planned and the children had to adapt their designs to make them stronger and more stable.”

Mrs Walton added: “This term, our focus word from the Pocklington School values is ‘courage’. All the children showed courage in their communication and testing their design ideas. Myself and fellow Year 2 Teacher, Mrs Snelling, were very impressed with how the children tackled this challenge.”