St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

As part of their study into materials, 2nd class have been designing and making ponchos! We’ve been examining the properties of materials recently and last week we discussed the meaning of the word ‘best’ when talking about products.

What does ‘best’ mean? 2nd class are brainstorming as part of their #ponchopopup project #designandmake

— St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) May 8, 2015

We decided that ‘best’ has different meanings depending on the context. Check out some of the meanings ‘best’ can have in our Vine. One of the examples we used was ‘I have the best car’. Some of the qualities of the best car could be:

fastest, safest, newest, most technology, nicest looking, nicest colour, most value for money and many more!       

We decided that the materials you would use to design something would depend on what you decided ‘best’ means. With that in mind, we designed and made ponchos. We set up Poncho Pop Up shops and cut out coins in preparation.

Coming soon to 2nd class – the Poncho Pop Up! #designandmake #ponchopopup pic.twitter.com/n2Kf9Cyt6A — St. Peter’s Primary (@StPetersBray) May 8, 2015

We split up into four groups and designed our ponchos. We also made posters to advertise our shops. We also examined different types of ponchos.

On Monday, we examined the four different types of materials that we had to choose from. We realised that the plastic one was the only waterproof one, but we found lots of good characteristics of the other materials too. We picked our materials randomly and we made our ponchos with help from Ms Moran and Ms Daly.

One of the important skills of Design and Make is measuring.

Working together to measure!

We used metre sticks to keep our measurements accurate!

Some of the materials were harder to manage than others.

This group used a hair band to measure the hole for the head.

We practised our sales pitches and we discussed what made our ponchos the best product! These are the finished products:

The plastic ponchos!

A very light gauzy material!

The towel ponchos!

Our cotton ponchos!

We went to different classes and presented our products to the students. We handed out our coins and asked them to ‘invest’ in the product that they thought made the best poncho. We encouraged the younger classes to use all of their senses to make their decisions.

6th class told us why they chose particular ponchos to support.

Presenting our projects to Senior Infants.

1st class investigated all of the materials carefully.

When we got back to class, we counted our coins and created a chart to show how the other classes spent their coins. We found that the towel poncho was the most popular.

We wondered if that was because the younger classes think that a towel dries you. We know that it’s because the towel material is absorbent and not waterproof.

Here’s a picture of our pictograph:

Our last job was to test the waterproof characteristics of our materials. We chose two different tests. First, we filled four different bowls with the same amount of water and left a corner of our fabric in it for five minutes. This was a fair test because even though the bowls were different sizes, we measured the same amount of water. After five minutes, we measured the amount of water left. This tested the absorbency of the material. The towel was the most absorbent, followed by the gauze. The cotton and the plastic weren’t very absorbent at all.

To test the waterproof-ness of the fabrics, we poured a glass of water over each fabric and put a cushion underneath to see if the poncho fabric protected it from the water. We found that the plastic and the cotton were the most waterproof and the gauze and the towel were the least waterproof. We concluded that the cotton has been treated with something because our t-shirts and jumpers aren’t usually waterproof at all!

We had a fantastic day with Design and Make and we couldn’t believe it when the bell rang for hometime. We really enjoyed our Poncho Pop-Up Project!