As part of our their learning in Design Technology, we have been exploring structures. Having discovered that a structure needs to have a flat base in order to be stable, we then explored cylinders as so many of the strong and stable structures that we have found are made of cylinders (just take a look at our playground climbing frame).
We learned how to create a cylinder out of a rectangle and were amazed to find out just how strong and stable a cylinder can be. Our challenge was to find out how many books our homemade cylinders could hold and some carried over 50 books. What a strong structure a cylinder is and that explains why our table and chair legs are cylindrical shaped!
Our final challenge was to design and create a chair for a bear. Having explored different structures, we set up our design criteria first. For a chair to be effective, it needed to be stable so that the bear did not fall off! We had great fun developing our joining techniques, adapting our ideas as we worked together and then tested our chairs to see if we had created a stable structure.
We are very proud of the final results as we all used card and sellotape to create a chair that a bear could sit on without falling off.