Pencaitland Primary Blog

Lesson 2 - 27/2/2007

We were set another ‘Impossible Mission’ in our second thinking skills lesson.

Before we could get started we did an exercise to show how important it is not to rush into doing something without listening to instructions and describing clearly the materials provided.  This exercise involved three volunteers.  Each was given a different object to describe to the class - who had to guess what the object was.  We were really good at this and were able to guess a bottle of tomato ketchup, a box of breakfast cereal and Spongebob Squarepants very quickly. 

Today’s mission (which we chose to accept!) was to make a bridge for a toy car to go under.  What made it ‘impossible’ was that we were only given a specific set of materials to use, we weren’t allowed to use anything else, like sellotape or glue.  We had one sheet of paper, a strip of card, one pipe cleaner, one art straw, one piece of plasticene, a few paperclips, a ruler and a pair of scissors. With our thinking partners, and the Mission Impossible theme tune ringing in our ears, we got started……

You can see us working below 

When we reviewed our bridges, again like last week, we found we had come up with different designs.  Most of us had used the card and paper to make a tunnel structure.  However some of us had used the art straw and pipe-cleaner as pillars on which to balance the paper, using plasticene to make the structure stand up.  One pair bent the card in half to make an L-shaped bracket and stretched the pipe-cleaner across this, from edge to edge, paper-clipping the edges to the card. Ingenious!

Now that we’re getting so good at these impossible missions, Mr Cain is going to make next weeks even more impossible.