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 we had a  building challenge. They had to create one that was staggered like the ones in the videos and one that was stacked to test which one was the strongest design.   The children used many of the stacking examples we saw on our wall walk to help with the challenge.