Pam Clark, Hannah Hogan and Carolynda Peltier, Nixa R-2
Millions of Americans watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade each year, but our second graders at Nixa’s John Thomas School of Discovery used the event as inspiration for a project of their own. Students created balloon floats in a hands-on lesson that incorporated science, social studies, math and ELA.
We kicked off the unit reading about an influential person, Tony Sarg. He is a real-life engineer and the brain behind the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Students evaluated his character traits and walked through how his ideas helped develop what we see on TV today. From there, they researched the parade and discovered the science and math behind the entire production - the size of the floats, the engineering process and thought that went into creating each balloon.
Students were then encouraged to create a balloon of their own. Just like they found in their research, they started with a sketch. Students thought of a character they believed should be added to the parade and made a model. They labeled and explained everything about their design so when it came time to build, they had everything they needed!
Students also had to explain why their balloon idea would be a great addition to the parade. After the design ideas were approved, the building process began! Sketches were brought to life as they created a small version of their balloon. The final products were displayed to our entire school when we had a parade around our track.
The entire project was very engaging! Parades are something the students were familiar with and they were excited to be in one of their own. However, they did have to show a lot of perseverance and grit during this project. Their designs had to be very in depth, the shape of their balloon may not have turned out to be exactly what they were thinking, and of course sometimes balloons popped.
The students were so happy showing off their work to the school and, after reflecting, were so happy they worked so hard throughout the entire process! This project can be as big or as small as your students make it. Truly letting students lead is part of the process. Reach out to PTA, parents and sponsors to help fund the project and really focus on the standards being taught. For us, this project encompassed many standards of various subjects. We wanted to take our learning from science with states of matter, different properties of materials, and the design process, character traits in ELA, adding, subtracting, and measuring in math, all the way to the history of how the parade along with everything else in the world has improved and changed over time.