Design Technology

Today, Year 5 continued our Design Technology Project – frame structures. We decided to make bird hides for Year 5 to watch wildlife.

We have already completed investigative and evaluative activities where we investigated and make annotated drawings of a range of portable and permanent frame structures. Then we completed focused practical tasks based on techniques for joining frameworks. Next, we designed and made a small scale frame structure.

He are a few of our small scale frames.

We thought about:

How we could make them stable?

How we could make them stronger?

Where were the weak points?

How we could reinforce them?

How we could improve the design?

We thought about the purpose of our project and the intended users.

Today we made our frame structures.

Now we need to critically evaluate our bird hides against our design specification, intended user and purpose.

Following our work on houses and homes and our walk to view different types of homes, we designed , made and evaluated our own home.  We had a focus on making hinges so that the doors and windows would open.

First we looked for hinges and found them in many places in the classroom, some Mrs Whyman didn’t even think of!

We then practised making different types of hinges and joins that we would use on our homes.

We then made our homes and evaluated them.

We also made homes from building blocks.

Y6 have been working extremely hard during Design and Technology lessons.  They have been designing a nightlight for a younger child.  Part of their design process was to do market research so they prepared questionnaires for the Y2 children.

Today in Design Technology, Y5 continued finding out about framed structures. We summarised our learning about the purpose of a structure and used a focused practical task to find the strongest shape for building.  Which shape do you think is stronger? Is it a triangle or a square?

Today in Design Technology, Year 5 began constructing their bird hides. They used ideas developed when making their models with art straws.

Last week in design technology, we learned that triangles are stronger shapes than squares.  Today we learned how to make shapes stronger by adding card triangles. An ‘L’ joint allows two pieces of wood to be joined at right angles. ‘L’ joints are used to make the corners of rectangular frames. Some people also made square frames or ‘T’ joints using lolly sticks.

After months of waiting due to lockdown, Year 3 have finally started creating their final product for their textiles D.T project. Our task was to design and create our own money container/purse. First we looked at existing products, evaluating the products while considering who their target audiences might be. Then we designed our own purses. To do this, we had to decide what fastening we would use and how we would make our products appealing to the target market. Next we made paper templates for our purses before finally starting to create our final pieces using sewing techniques to join materials. Y3 have made an excellent start to their purses and will finish these off over the next couple of weeks.