MANSFIELD – It all started with a connection to a story, and led to 30 excited children seeing a cement truck up close in the school parking lot.
They had barely made it out of the building before Moritz mechanic John Gould and driver Jeff Gledhill were fielding eager questions like: “Can we drive it? “How long does it take to learn to drive it?”
Kindergarteners at Discovery School read the book Building with Dad by Carol Nevius, learning about a little boy who watches his dad’s construction team as they build a new school.
After reading about the machines and vehicles that prepared the site, poured the construction pad, and built the school, the students had lots of questions they wanted to know more about.
They turned their wonders into a class project during their Genius Hour, a once a week time set aside to research and learn about projects and questions of the students’ own choice.
They read and researched different construction equipment, charting which ones move dirt versus other materials. From there, each picked their favorite large machine they had learned about, made a graph, and shared their opinion in writing.
As a part of the International Baccalaureate curriculum, each class completes a series of Units of Inquiry, and Mrs. Sidders brought this interest in construction into their current Unit.
While they have been working on timelines and thinking about how time moves chronologically in their own life from being born to coming to Kindergarten, they made a timeline thinking about a construction site and what has to happen first, next, then, and last.
With all of this curiosity from the students, Sidders’ Kindergarten assistant, Savannah Gould, shared that her husband John, is a mechanic that works on cement trucks at Moritz Concrete.
The students asked to have him bring a truck to see up close after all their work on research. Gould and Moritz driver, Jeff Gledhill, answered questions while students shared about the different materials they had learned make up concrete.
Simon Clark, Head of School shared, “This project is a great example of how we take students from the Ohio standards and our curriculum and move them into taking action around their own interests.
“Learning like this makes real connections to the community and to life beyond the classroom.”
For more information about the school, visit their website at www.discovery-school.net.