St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

To celebrate Science Week 2015 we decided to get creative in Senior Infants. We have been learning about ‘House and Home’ recently and read one of our favourite books ‘The Three Little Pigs’! We love this story and were inspired to try to design and create our own houses using some different types of materials, including plastic straws, wooden blocks, coloured card and Play Doh. We wanted to find out which material would be best to use to make a house for our classroom puppets. Before the group experiments began we made some predictions. We predicted that the wooden blocks would be the best material to use to make a home as they felt much stronger than the other materials. Then it was time to get designing! Teamwork and co – operation was really important during this activity.

Working hard on our house designs

Deciding how to use the straws to build a house. Excellent team work!

After each group finished their designs we then discussed the suitability of each material for building a house. The Play Doh house looked fantastic but we agreed that it was difficult to construct the roof so the puppets might get wet on a rainy day. The house made from card looked very impressive but the boys and girls pointed out that the wind and rain would result in it falling down! The straw house was a really unusual design but unfortunately it had no walls or roof! The poor puppets wouldn’t be too sheltered in there! However the wooden blocks design seemed to offer everything we were looking for! It had good, solid walls, windows and doors and a roof! Our prediction was correct and we were glad to know that even if we huffed and puffed like the big bad wolf our wooden house would remain standing! Well done to the boys and girls on their hard work and on using their scientific skills of planning, predicting, making and evaluating!

Huffing and puffing to test the strength of our new design!

We were delighted that our prediction was right! Our wooden house was very strong.