Bridge Building

Mackinac Bridge

Bridges assist humans with transportation needs, and humans have been building them for thousands of years.  Of course, there are some basic types of bridges, but with technology bridges have advanced and continue to become stronger and longer.  Here are various types of bridges found at Bridges 101, which was created for a sixth grade project.  Two more valuable site created for the PBS website on bridge basics and The Society of Women Engineers.  Also, check out How Bridge Work, which goes over three of the following bridges.

1. Arch Bridge (Video on Arch Bridge)
2. Beam Bridge
3. Suspension Bridge
4. Cantilever 

There are three forces that act on bridges.  They are compression, tension, and torsion.  

Here is a video listing some of the problems that present themselves when a bridge is needed for transportation.  This is a National Geographic video and includes a few examples of bridges.




Bridge Building Game.
The purpose of the game is to construct a bridge that will allow the lemming like pink dinosaurs to cross safely across a chasm.  Here are links to similar games:

• Cargo Bridge
• Bridgecraft

I will leave you with a video of Galloping Gertie.  This was the nickname of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge after it collapsed in 1940.  I definitely would not want to be anywhere near this bridge when it failed.

Towers and Structures

During our Inventions Unit, we will be learning about structures, bridges, gears, and other man made inventions. This post was created to provide additional resources on towers.  Are you ready?  Here we go...

• Science Olympiad Wiki
• Newspaper Tower Activity

Here are some experiment videos from Zoom:

1. Columns: Finding the Strongest Shape 
2. Columns: Experimenting with Cups

Tower Basics

In order to stay up, towers have to compete with a couple different forces.  Here is what PBS says about the forces working against towers:  "Gravity and the dead load of the tower push down, the ground pushes back up, and small air movements push from the side. A foundation distributes the load into the surrounding ground material and can help balance the sideways wind force. The size of the foundation depends on the strength of the supporting ground. A foundation placed in rock can be smaller than a foundation placed in sand or mud."  So, we are working against the wind, the tower's weight, and the tower's foundation.

Tower Videos

Watch following video on constructing various towers and tall structures. The first two videos are on the Eiffel Tower from the History Channel. 



 

The next video is on the Statue of Liberty and the information on the structure.



This is a video on the Twin Towers from the History Channel.

Tower Task

1. Learn about towers and structures
2. Design your tower with partners
• Why are you building this way?
• What do you have to consider when building the tower?
• How can you build a tall but sturdy tower?
3. Collect the materials:
• Cup, Marshmellows, Toothpicks, and Plate
4. Build you tower
5. Test your towers design
• Make changes to make your tower better as you find weak areas

National Poetry Month

I wanted to create a post to describe what the students did in April for poetry month.  In addition, I wanted to share my Scoop.it account for Poetry Month.  At this link, you can find several resources that can be used to write poetry.

First of all, let me say that I don't just teach poetry in the month of April, but this is when it receives the most attention.  I like to encourage reading and writing poetry throughout the year, which would be completed during their free choice reading and/or writer's workshop time.  I can usually hook a standoffish reader/writer with poetry because of the shorter nature of the reading/writing.

My daughter's birth stopped me from promoting the use of tech for the students' projects, but I wanted students to construct a poetry project using various ineractive websites.  I was thinking of creating blog posts, Glog O' Poems, poem podcasts (using Audioboo, Voicethread, Photo Story 3, or Audacity), Little Bird Tales with multiple poems, or create a Prezi for your poems.  Here is a teacher's requirements for a poetry Glogster.  I still recommend and encourage students start to interact with some of these web tools.  If anyone creates something using these web-tools, I might have to reward the students in some way. 

Student books were created in the classroom and required that each student complete the following requirements:

• Write/publish at least 10 creative for the poetry book
• Organize your book's content with a table of contents
• Provide a book title, name, and illustrated cover
• Write a summary or provide reviews on the back cover of your book
• Create illustrations for each poem
• Include poetry techniques learned in class (i.e. similes, metaphors, alliteration, hyperbole, repetiton, onomatopoeia, etc.)
• Include several higher-level vocabulary words (aka "Wow Words")

The following picture is an example of a interesting type of poem called a Book Binding Poem, which uses the titles found on book bindings to write a poem.  Here is my example:

With the book titles, I was attempting to write...

Funny boy
Chronicles
21st Century Skills 
Into the Wild

So, even I am a poet and I hardly even know it.  Again, I wanted to share our project for National Poetry month.

Mr. Gibson
(AKA Hoosier Teacher)

P.S.  We won't have a Discovery Quest or April Book Report project due this month.