Year 4 Design Technology: Exploring Structures

Year 4 have been busy learning and exploring structures over the past few weeks as part of their current DT project on ‘Roman Pavilions’

During the first lesson, the children were given cocktail sticks and plasticine and found different ways to make structures. They used photographs of famous and existing structures and pavilions to inspire their ideas. In this lesson, the children started to think about the importance of base shapes. They had lots of fun being creative and coming up with original designs.

 
In the second lesson, the children worked with cardboard strips, double sided tape and card to make a cube-like structure. The purpose of this lesson was to explore how to join materials and also how to reinforce these joins so that the structure would be more robust. The children used joinery ideas from existing structures to help them, such as triangular corner pieces and hinge-like joins.

Within our most recent lesson, the children learned about cladding by looking at photographs from real life structures. They learned about the different purposes of cladding before beginning to think about how they could use materials to clad their structure. The children were given the brief to create a Roman aesthetic design and used photos of Roman pavilions to support their thinking. They cut, rolled, folded and made marks on card before attaching this material to their structure. The results are rather convincing and certainly give a Roman appearance!

Now that the children have the skills and knowledge needed from their exploration lessons, they will begin to design their own Roman Pavilions using shapes, materials, joins and cladding of their choosing. We hope to display these once they have been created!

Hopefully you received some information last week regarding a 'Roman Soldier Day' which Year 4 are having on Thursday 3rd February. The information is attached here also as a PDF.

From the Year 4 Team