Over the course of their time together, 3rd graders are thinking about Movement, the Umbrella theme for this year’s school-wide reflection. From marble tracks to roller coasters to aqueducts and true to a Reggio-inspired curriculum, their ideas prompted study across subjects and with real-world applications in history, geography, and science. While exploring everything from gravity and friction to volume, slope and inertia, they are also building resiliency and compassion, collaborating and compromising, articulating ideas and testing them — and, this is Sabot, they’re getting muddy in the meantime. 

The Beginning

3rd Graders worked in teams to move a marble from one place to another with only a few rules in place: you can touch it with your hand only once; you can't move your body if you have the marble; if the marble hits the ground you must start over. What does a marble need to move around a loop? How does something stay on its track? 

From teacher-researchers Patrick and Hannah: “The teamwork and communication…was amazing. Everyone worked on it for a solid 40 minutes and could have continued. When the ball was dropped it was disappointing [and] this caused some strife…Bouncing back may have taken some time and space, but it always happened.  They bounced back partly because everyone was eager to try again and partly because their relationships are strong enough to get through some strife.”

Teachers deliberately set out poor materials for students to use and for nearly three months, students worked with yardsticks, marbles, and rubber bands, experimenting with structural stability, kinetic energy, and gravity in order to make a successful track.

The (Messy) Middle

What other things move using gravity? When a brainstorming session about movement and gravity landed on water, the class began its deep dive into the ways water moves across distances. They studied their own faucets, then the James River filtering system; they learned about Mesopotamia and the Roman aqueducts and the ways that the people of Mexico City built canals in order to bring freshwater over a lake of salt water. 

Patrick introduced new material—bamboo—and after exploration about bamboo itself as a uniquely beneficial material, the class set to work on a systems design for a specific purpose: to cool down their sweaty friends after April’s one mile fun run. In the process, they discovered the reliable tripod method of stability, learned a helpful knot (the triplod lash!), and continued their study of the benefits and challenges of an aqueduct system.

The class generally understood some of the benefits and difficulties of aqueducts, particularly in their study of the ancient Romans. What was inconsistent among the class included the origin and destination of the water. Some mentioned filters and evaporation problems. And some began asking larger questions: What do people do without aqueducts? What if there is no plumbing? Who carries it? How far? How much water does a person even need? 

After making a list of things for which water is needed and estimating of how much water they use, students were given volume containers to help them measure. Then, third grade was challenged to carry their own water from a stream in the forest back to the classroom. They were asked to measure how much they collected so they could decide how long it would last if we were to use it. 

As Patrick writes, “Every group started out pretty much in chaos. They had no system to decide where exactly to get the water, or how to work together so people mostly just went off on their own. There was a lot of frustration for a while, but once people started gathering water the teamwork kicked in and most groups did a great job of working together to carry the water back. There were some complaints of child labor, but at the same time no group chose to empty their jugs to make them a little lighter, which was suggested by both teachers many times. It was a long slog back, but people were very proud of themselves. There were many comments about how difficult this is and how strong people must be to do it everyday. There was a connection with the water delivery people who carry these jugs for a job everyday.”

Reflection

In the care of teachers skilled in listening, observation, and student-led inquiry, 3rd graders now have first-hand, real-world understanding of engineering systems that have literally transformed the modern world and, in this case, made for a healthier human existence. Rather than more traditional instruction like powerpoint presentations and worksheets, 3rd graders have learned with depth, agency, meaning, and relevance not only some important scientific methodologies and principles of movement but also how and why things work, how we came to know what we know, and the many benefits of committed design-build collaboration.