PAPERSTICKTOWERS

By Kristin Keller

Second and third grades

Objectives:

Students will work in teams of three or four to construct the tallest and strongest tower possible. Students will practice working as a team. They will assign jobs within the team, use positive verbalization to express opinions and needs and reach a consensus on their construction goal.

Materials:

•Pictures of towers, Eiffel tower, Seattle Space Needle, Tower of Pisa. Watts Towers, etc.

•Many (20- 50 per team) newspaper sticks. These are made by rolling a sheet of newspaper diagonally on a ¼ “ dowel taped around the middle when it is all rolled up and removed from the dowel. I used ¼ of a full newspaper sheet or ½ of a newspaper advertisement. The ads are more colorful.

•Masking tape, 1 roll per team.

Vocabulary:

•Sculpture

•Tower

•Construction

•Teamwork

•Geometric shapes

Procedure:

Look at pictures of towers. Notice how they are all bigger at the bottom and get smaller as they go up. Explain that the students will be competing with each other in teams to build the tallest strongest tower in the class.

Each student will start by using one paper stick folded around to make a geometric shape and taped togetherand then attaching a straight stick to it. Then they will start connecting their shape and stick combinations to the ones their teammates made. They will have to communicate with each other in a positive way so that each person is involved. They may choose to have one person tear off pieces of tape to have ready, one person may make all of the geometric shapes, etc.

  • Second and third grade students will need to be taught how to tear masking tape and they will need to be taught to overlap the ends of the sticks before taping to make a strong joint.

Closure:

Stop construction with 10 minutes left of class. Clean up. Give each team a chance to tell about their tower, how they divided the work, if they thought it went well.

Measure the tower and do the strength test. We called this the big bad wolf test, but since we couldn’t really blow on the tower I picked it up about a foot and dropped it on the table. We charted the results which we kept for other classes to see. The class winners got skittles. Teams took their towers back to their classrooms where they hung them from the ceiling. One class even connected all of their towers together.

This is a wonderful problem solving activity and it is great listening to them solving construction problems.

National Standards:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6