First Grade Engineers! Bridge Building

I am so proud of my first grade engineers! I presented them with a story I wrote about gnomes trying to solve a big problem: they must get from their village into town in order to sell their vegetables. There is a large lake separating the village & town.  Engineers are needed to design & build bridges for the gnomes. I wrote this lesson plan to meet the NGSS engineering standard for first grade:

Before we began designing & building, we examined the structure of many well known bridges to determine what each bridge had to have:

Everyone's favorite bridge seemed to be Tower Bridge:

Everyone made a fantastic bridge! All bridges had to meet 2 important criteria: the bridge must span the lake and it must be able to accomodate 2 gnomes at a time. I used my classroom green screen to put grade 1C into gnomeland:

The first graders worked so hard on their bridges! I love seeing their fantastic creations!! Here are photos of grade 1C's bridges, they finished today. I will post grade 1Q as soon as their bridges are complete!

1Q: