Construction

As with other CLASP subjects, Construction is underpinned by the National Curriculum programme of study for Design and Technology. In all units, children are guided through the evaluation of existing products, research into product use and finally their own design. All designs are brought to life over the course of the unit and evaluated at the end based on the brief used at the start.

Because the groups are so small, the teachers can take the children beyond what would be expected at primary level. Children use a range of materials and tools; progress can been seen across the key stage where in Year 6, children work more independently using equipment such as hand saws, hand drills and hammers to put together their work. The units in CLASP also often bring together other subjects areas such as Science, Maths and Art and Design and always link closely to the topic the children are following back in their own class.

This term in construction, we have been making marble runs using recycled material. We started by investigating some existing products to see how they worked before designing and creating our own. We used safety knives to cut the material we needed and glue guns to join each section together. Our greatest challenge was making the runs sturdy as we had to think of ways to reinforce it to make it as strong as possible.

Our challenge was to create a run that lasted for 10 seconds – which was much harder than we originally thought.

Here are some pictures which show our design/making process