Clock Watching
5MS have been doing DT this half term, and their brief has been to design and make a jazzy looking clock face. A time piece so fine and striking it will grace the wall of any living room in Solihull!
Underpinning any successful design and build task is thorough preparation. Mrs Beech insisted that the group should try out their ideas beforehand in their sketchbooks. Having outlined a square on which to work, the children started by putting a dot as close to the middle as they could manage. They then had to draw two lines across the square to divide it into four roughly equal parts. The lines could be wiggly or even a zigzag, but the rule was that they had to pass through the middle point. A few adventurous children wanted to investigate what the design would look like with three lines across the square. Others added additional decoration to their prototype.
Once this preliminary stage was completed, it was time to make the clock face for real. The children were working with two squares of card in contrasting colours, which they had fixed together with blu tak. Cutting the two pieces of card simultaneously meant that the design could be reassembled showing the alternate colours.
It all sounded very easy when Mrs Beech explained it but, in practice, it was much more difficult. If you accidentally turned over a piece of card, as Harvey discovered, it was hard to be certain where exactly it fitted back into the design. Zaki found that his cards refused to reform into a square at all, and there was a great deal of head scratching and puzzlement before a result was achieved. Everyone agreed that it was like doing the most fiendish jigsaw imaginable and that they should definitely dust off their jigsaw boxes at home. They may have been around for over 250 years, but jigsaws remain a valuable way to train the eye for such intricate moments as these. Your blogger, in fact, relishes the challenge of a good jigsaw puzzle occasionally, and has found a handy app on her iPad for the purpose where the pieces never get lost!
Next, the children had to glue the card pieces onto the wooden clock template provided by Mrs Beech, whilst at the same time ensuring that they kept their design intact. It was important, she told them, to apply the glue to the entire surface of the template but also to avoid getting too much glue on the card or any on yourself! It was certainly a task for which a great deal of concentration was required.
At the end of the lesson, Zac and Alex were proud to show off what they had made. Once the clocks are finished, Mrs Beech will help the children to attach a mechanism to them, and they will be able to take them home. There will never be an excuse for being late for school again!