Today in STEM we went on a Wall Walk.  We know that we are going to build walls with mortar just like Yi Min and Chen did in our STEM story Yi Min's Great Wall.  We went on the wall walk to build our schema about the way engineers build walls today and in the past.  Then we watched as short movie about walls. wall movie  We created a chart with some of the examples we saw them we compared how all the walls were the same and different.  We looked at the walls with mortar and the walls without and discuss how we feel our wall would be stronger with the mortar.  So then we made a chart recording our thoughts on what would make a strong mortar.  To extend our schema about walls and what makes a strong wall our building challenge this week is to build a 1 foot wall that is 8 inches tall out of blocks that can withstand a marble strike.  The children were using many of the stacking examples we saw on out walk to help with the challenge. 

We found through our building challenge that the staggered walls were the strongest.