Marble Run

For the last few months the marble run in Otters class has been an incredibly popular learning choice in the mornings. Miss Sullivan has been observing the children building their own runs and overcoming difficulties by working together and solving problems. She made a much larger space for the children to build in and was surprised when Mateo constructed a magnificent feat of engineering with a  marble run that rested on a nearby table. This solved the problem of stability in its wobbly middle!

Last month the children began adding other materials from the classroom to enhance their marble run.

The children moved some of the cylinders from the junk modelling table down to the large blackboard outside Squirrels class and started to tape them on. They created their own large scale marble run. The children were overcoming different problems than those they faced with the small plastic marble run in Otters class. However they were still using the skills they had been practising, such as perseverance and teamwork.

They had to manoeuvre large bulky tubes, and various types of joining materials. The children soon discovered that using Sellotape was much more 'people heavy' than the blue tape which could be ripped whilst still holding the tube in place. The sellotape required a separate 'unroller', cutter, sticker and ''holder upper''. No-body was free to test that the marble ran down without any hitches!!! (This proved to be the most popular of jobs!)

There were a lot of test runs which resulted in some very skilled patching up of gaps and holes. The children very quickly learnt from their first mistakes and were soon heard calling out to each other to... ''hold the tube still or there will be a gap when we stick it.''

There was a very excited group of children when the marble eventually ran all the way through the do-it-yourself marble run unscathed. There were a few tricky moments when the marble was almost lost under the Hedgehog trays. That in itself required some tactical thinking. The narrowest tube was selected to poke underneath and push the marble into the upturned tape basket!

Mateo had his engineering hat on again and wondered if he could combine the plastic marble run pieces to their cardboard tube marble run. He very carefully constructed a small plastic run that he balanced precariously, on an upturned log from the creative area natural object baskets, so that it was at exactly the right level as the bottom of the blackboard. It worked!

This prompted the other children to think about other ways in which the two could be combined. A shute was added to the start of the run but a very interesting conversation about gravity was started because if it wasn't stuck on exactly level the marble would not spin down it but instead roll to one edge. The children still haven't solved this problem. The blue tape and masking tape is not strong enough to hold it level.

The next day we were surprised to see that Mrs Gill had left the children a challenge. She loved the learning that was happening but wanted to extend our thinking even more...She has challenged the children to make their own marble run that has some changes of direction!

This is proving very tricky!

But...

We will do it!!

Thank you for all of the tube donations...we have a lovely collection now. Lots of different shapes and sizes just right for the tricky patching up.