First Annual Thanksgiving Cardboard Construction Challenge

Wow!  I had read about classes, clubs and entire schools doing Global Cardboard Challenges, and I really wanted for our class to do one, but I honestly had no idea how it would really work out. When I looked at blogs to get advice, they mostly said the best thing to do was just to go for it, so we did!

The week before Thanksgiving, the class watched Caine's Arcade, a heart-warming video about a boy who builds an entire cardboard arcade one summer.  If you haven't seen the story of the boy who inspired the cardboard construction movement, it's definitely worth watching.

Then, the half-day Wednesday before the Thanksgiving break, students brought in lots of cardboard, lots of tape and one wonderful mom brought in all kinds of markers.  We had a nearly two hour block of time for the challenge.  The only rules were students could build alone or in groups of up to four people, students needed to be polite and kind, students needed to use their imaginations and they needed to have fun.

Here are the before photos:

Here are some photos from the event:

The morning was fantastic. Although it was pretty unstructured, the students quickly broke off into single person and multi-person groups.  They helped each other refine ideas - one of my favorites was when a race-car morphed into a pirate ship.  Another was when one student suggested to a friend that an egg carton section would make a perfect polar bear face (it did).  Students worked together to hold pieces in place for taping or adjusting.  Students negotiated different building groups almost seamlessly.  The ideas were flying around and for almost all of the time period, all of the students were building.  

This activity is a keeper for next year (without the styrofoam snow!)