Try combining the science “Materials” unit with the art unit “Can Buildings Speak?” for a cross-curricular projectdisplay on building materials.

The “investigation” was our outdoor walk around the school hunting for metal, glass, plastic, wood and other materials in the fabric of the building and talking about the properties of materials used to make windows, fences, handles and so on.

The next week, I displayed “lift the flap” photographs on my classroom wall, with the words glass, metal, wood etc. underneath. The children then made a display of designs of their own ideal home (the Blackpool Tower, in one case).

This led to a narrative literacy lesson on adjectives, studying The Three Little Pigs and how they’d used the wrong building materials. We came up with descriptive words like “flimsy”, “light,” “robust” and even “puff-proof”. The red group then made three little cereal box houses (of straw, twigs and “bricks”) to add to our architectural display.

A fantastic plenary is the book Pigs Might Fly by Jonathan Emmett (a version in which the pigs make aeroplanesI) The Three Little Pigs can be found on the web atwww-math.unipaderborn.

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Beverley Kirk teaches at St Luke’s C of E primary, Bury, Lancs