Amusement Park Unit

As our historical figures unit wrapped up we noticed that our learners were engrossed by building and creating. Whether it was recreating Laura Ingalls Wilder’s house out of popsicle sticks or sculpting replicas of Princess Margaret’s crown jewels, our learners love to get crafty. Wanting to keep the tinkering momentum going, we decided our next unit would be to create a miniature amusement park. 

This unit provides so many opportunities for learners to dive in and pursue their own interests, while still all being engaged in one group project. Amusement parks combine science, literacy, and math (and even history when we learned the history of roller coasters and amusement parks to add to our historical timeline).

We started the unit by learning about Newton’s Laws of Motion and other basic physics principles to understand how rides work. We’ve explored simple machines and created hypotheses based on our observations and our new knowledge of these principles. We’ve watched videos of amusement park rides and explored how we think we could re-create them. We’ve spun on merry-go-rounds and whirled cups of water over our heads to experience centripetal force. 

Some learners even took it upon themselves to create their own videos about these physics principles since the ones we’ve used to learn for ourselves are “too young and babyish” for them. These learners planned out how to best demonstrate the physics principles in real life, directed their friends where to stand and what to say, and then used voice-overs in video-editing software to explain the physics. They’ve spent far more time with these ideas than we thought they would -all based on the complaint that “those videos are boring. I could do better.” I love watching kids take ownership of their learning.

Creating amusement park rides also lends itself to writing opportunities - our rides need signs to direct visitors where to go and what to do. These signs are great writing opportunities for learners still developing their encoding (spelling) skills because they provide a reason to carefully sound out a word and write it down for others to read.

We've even started looking at advertisements and how marketers get our attention so that we can make our own advertisements. to bring people to our rides. What sensory words can we use to describe what it feels like on our rides?

We are busy measuring as we build - and working on fractions to understand what ½ an inch, ¼ an inch, and ¾ of an inch are in relation to a whole.

Most importantly, any tinkering project includes opportunities for learners to try and fail - and then to try again. We’ve guided our learners through “I wonder why that doesn’t work. Hmmm… have you tried _______ to see the difference between the shapes?” or “Plan A didn’t work. What’s plan B?” This is put into practice even when sharing the most desired crafting tool - the hot glue gun. Sure, we could get two - but with only one we have a lot of opportunities to practice waiting, patience, and identifying a Plan B if we don’t want to wait.

It’s been amazing to watch these rides come together as learners started from broad ideas and slowly began tweaking and tinkering to come up with something better than they had before.