11/23/2025
🐷🐷🐷🐺
Our week was full of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf! To end our week we built all three of the pigs’ houses and had the big bad wolf (fan) try to blow them down! The students worked in groups of two or three to make their designated house. I gave them the materials and let them try to figure out what they wanted to do. I encouraged them to talk with their partner (s) about their ideas before they started.
As you can imagine with preschoolers, they started trying to do things individually without talking to their partner. So I modeled how to tell a partner an idea, then we all practiced. We (my para and I) coached them along as needed. Then they began building. They really weren’t sure what to do, so we tried asking some questions without telling them what to do. What do houses have to help them stay up? (walls) If you built walls how many would you need? Our kids said one wall. We asked if they thought a house with one wall would stay up… they said no. I mentioned they could count the walls in our room. They did and said there were four.
Teacher takeaways: 🐷My students didn’t know how to work together/talk to each other on instinct; in fact with coaching it was even difficult for some. 🐷My students would have benefitted from a discussion and a look at houses (play house, small dollhouse, photos, videos, etc) to understand the structure better. 🐷My students loved the anticipation of if the houses would be blown away. 🐷My students enjoyed the hands on activity and didn’t even realize they missed time in centers. 🐷My students were cooperating and not arguing as they tried working together. 🐷They needed more coaching than I thought, but then I realized we had not tried something like this before.
🐷But they had fun, made good observations and predictions, and had a basic understanding of why they houses didn’t fall down. It was a fun learning activity!
🏠 1: straw = yellow pipe cleaners
🏠 2: wood = big craft sticks and playdough
🏠 3: brick = red legos
🐺= blow dryer or fan
