Gigantic squash soup and some building design specifications
This week students chose between creating a mood-board and design specifications for the proposed Earth School building and making soup.
Samson gave the students a lesson on design specifications and planning rooms within a building.
we made soup with an enormous butternut squash donated to Earth School by a friend in Greytown. Soup making was a very popular choice ... highlighting the students passion for edible education. Food education is the most powerful way to affect positive change in kids’ lives. Developing a hands-on relationship with food builds an essential skill set that kids will take with them into adulthood having a profound impact on their health and wellness for years to come.
The wonderful thing about edible education is that it is truly cross curricular, with elements of maths (measuring), english (following a recipe), science, health, art, history, civics, engineering and design, ecology, and technology. But developing the knowledge base in the classic subjects is just the tip of the iceberg as they say. Edible education curriculum also develops real life skills that can only be cultivated with hands on experience. Students learn how to work together to solve problems. We added fresh herbs, garlic and ginger and onions to the cooked squash.
The rest of the team got into small groups and were given the 10 ideas for building rooms originally chosen by the students in Workshop 2.
These ideas for rooms were:
- Kitchen
- Greenhouse
- Treehouse
- Tropical house
- Bug lab
- Science lab
- Craft room
- Technology room
- Community space
- Robotics lab
These ideas for rooms need to be combined to provide an Earth School building design with mixed use spaces, Students worked together to combine space ideas and consider building materials and design ideas.
The finished product was a mood board and list of specifications for the proposed building.
Specifications listed how many classrooms and their proposed uses, ideas for roofing, flooring, energy production and construction materials.
Most of the groups chose to group together the technology room and robotics lab, many combined the tropical house/greenhouse and bug lab.
There are some brilliant ideas for multi-level tree house designs and integral greenhouse corridors using an earthship style design.
Now we have 5 different ideas for how the building can progress, next week we will be writing the specifications for each of these mood boards and coming up with 5 possible designs to display at our Matariki display.