In this exciting hands-on project, students got to design and build their own ship.  Their challenge was to build a ship that could float on water and take on heavy cargo at the same time.  Just like in the days of exploration when ships needed to be sturdy -but not too heavy- to be able to take on their looted cargo. 

Students first created a design, then built and ultimately sailed their ship on water.  They finalized their project with a cargo challenge where they filled their ship with “supplies&booty” to see how many riches it could hold and sail home with. 

Doing hands on projects in class is an excellent way to increase student engagement and thus student learning.  Students not only work on their academic skills, but they work on their ATL skills as well.  Hands on projects give students the opportunity to build independent skills like time management.  Projects also tend to require working in groups and sharing supplies, so it gives students opportunity to work on their collaboration skills. 

Hands on projects create excellent opportunities for students to work cross curricular.  In this project students combined their UOI work, literacy skills and knowledge with their math unit in order to be successful.  Students imagined that they were explorers crossing the vast ocean.  They were able to imagine what it was like thanks to all the reading, research and writing that they did about explorers through their UOI and literacy work.  They had to use their knowledge of what they learned about exploration to help them decide on the shape, size and style of their ship.  Furthermore, they used their math knowledge from their current unit (measurement with capacity, area, volume and perimeter) to determine what “ocean” would be best to “sail” on and what the dimensions of their boats should be.  They also had to use their knowledge of measurement with weight to estimate the weight of their boat and see how much more weight their boat could carry.  When the challenge was all over, they had to weigh their cargo to see how successful they were. 

Studies show that students retain knowledge when engaged.  These students won’t soon forget what it was like to be an explorer and what it takes to create and plan mathematically a seafaring ship!