We have taken it down!  What a sad way to end it all…with 2 inches of snow on the ground.  What took us 2 months to build and put up now took 30 minutes to take down.  There is still plenty to do though.

• All of the plywood we purchased and used for the Sukkah is being put to use.  4th graders are building little floats for a project they are working on and need 18 inch x 18 inch plywood sheets for their projects to sit on.  We are in the midst of measuring everything out to those dimensions and then cutting into squares, to be reused.
• All of the 2x4s we used also have a purpose.  4th graders, as part of their project, also needed to cut 4 legs apiece for their stand.  We took the 2x4s from the Sukkah (this year and previous years projects) and had the 4th graders cut the legs out of the wood.  All left over wood will be used either on the future Sukkah or projects in the Makerspace.
• All of the screws and bolts that we labored to get in are being put right back to use.  Many of the screws will go to the 4th grade projects whereas bolts will be set aside from next year’s Sukkah group.

The part I like most about this project is the nature of the cycle of reusing what we have and limiting our purchasing.  Why buy something new when we can reuse the stuff from years past.

In addition to the deconstruction, students are also working on preparing for their student led conferences.  We have been evaluating our self-reflections from the quarter, in addition to some grades each student assigned for their work thus far.  From there, students can successfully identify their strengths, areas of growth, and together we will develop a plan for improvement moving into the next quarter and beyond.

What goes up must come down, right?  What took us about 2 months to construct is quickly coming down in a matter of days.  We started our deconstruction of the Sukkah today, starting first with the plywood siding (which took about 4 full days of 12 kids to get up…now it took 3 kids 25 minutes to take it down and inside).  Next, we worked on taking down portions of the roof, which once again took hours it seems to put up, but minutes to take down.

We will continue the process of taking everything down tomorrow, with the goal of getting all the walls down on Monday.  The reverse construction is tough because we have to maintain safety, meaning we need to put the supports back up while at the same time working quickly to get it all done.

the roof is coming down piece by piece

parts of our roof already down. now; what to do with those pieces…

figuring out where all our screws are in the walls

it took a dozen students to get the board up, but not even three to get it down. lucky we mastered the shouting “timber” what a board is ready to come down

our groups getting ready to take our boards inside

Some say endings are bitter sweet.  There is nothing bitter about this ending!  We finally finished (albeit there is a ton left we could do, but a deadline is a deadline and we cannot change the calendar).  What a process this has been; amazing overall work.  It is weird thinking that less than 2 months ago, this entire thing (the Sukkah) was but a cardboard cutout sitting in my classroom.  Now, it is an actual structure sitting in front of the school.  Looking at the journey, we did great, but each day was filled with little battles and moments of progress.

Although each of the students blogged this year for each day, I think next year I need to be more intentional about linking learning targets/goals to each blog post and have them centered around a particular theme.  Having them prepared in advance would be helpful as well (meaning giving the kids a booklet at the beginning of the Sukkah project of our blog posts rather than day by day).

our MJDS decoration not only bled onto the sheet, but the rain had its way with the cartons.

some last minute efforts to work on decorations.

doing a few gluing projects for decorations.

just trying to make sure there is more shade than sun!

We made amazing progress today.  We are so far along with the siding of our walls.  We worked on getting all plywood up/organized as much as possible.  We are also working at starting to get our roof up; which is a monumental task as well!

securing some of our plywood to our walls.

cutting out our opening for our whiteboard.

it really is a team effort to get everything up and ready.

lots of measuring, scouting, and discussion takes place before anything is added to the Sukkah.

Lots of ladders and lots of moving in order to get done our walls.

We are pretty much done!  It only took countless days and hours to finish, but we are just about there.  Almost all the siding is up.  Nearly everything on the roof if covered.  We have a few tweaks here and there, but otherwise we did it!  What an amazing process thus far.

screwing in some of the plywood

you can hardly see it, but we are in the woods, cutting down branches of trees to be used for our roof.

cleaning up the items we are not using.

starting to get our natural roof together

putting some of our decorations up.

Another day, more progress.  We officially have all four walls up!  We have started to secure our structure with additional supports (before we work to take down our temporary supports).  We have also started with some non-essential decorations, such as the window.  Our next big task is to finish our structural supports, start putting up siding, and finish our roof structure.  Not bad for a bunch of 7th graders!

drilling our holes for our bolts to hold the walls together

drilling our holes for our bolts to hold the walls together

securing supports along the roof of the structure to provide additional strength the our building

our window, freshly installed, into our window frame we made

If you are not able to drive by our school to see our progress thus far, look no further.  We have three walls up (and after almost 24 hours….none have fallen!!!!).  Take a look at some of the progress we made yesterday.

Our first wall to be put up. This wall is our door frame wall. Once we got it upright and plumb, we screwed in some diagonal supports.

Our next task was to prepare our second wall, a slanted and heavy wall to lift. We had to get it prepared on the ground before lifting it.

We are moving it into our final location, next to our wall that is already vertical. Just a little lift, a little support, and we are good to go.

Our team clamped the two walls together so we could line everything up before screwing in and securing our bolts.

After getting our bolts in, we had to get on the ladder to tighten each nut. These two walls are officially attached to each other.

We are moving our third wall, the back wall, into place. Soon we can get it connected to the other walls.

We are holding the third wall in place while supports are being put in place before we secure everything.

We are getting our bolts put in for the last major wall connection. In case you did not know, this wall is tall!

Our fourth wall is yet to be installed, but we are getting there!

A look at some of our diagonal supports we installed to hold the wall in place temporarily.

A look at our wall from the road. Not a bad day’s work!

A look at our wall from the road. Not a bad day’s work! You can see the differing height of the wall.

Almost every wall is finished (we have to install the window in one of our side walls)!  Everything is secured; nailed and screwed together, bolts in between our big students, everything is set!  All we needed to do now was move the walls to their near final resting spot.  We moved them from the Circle Drive to Santa Monica (not in the road, on our property still).  It was a really cool experience to see nearly everyone working together in a calm, respectful way.  A few of the students even took charge to help out others (and do so kindly rather than our traditional way of yelling and screaming).  Our next big task is to bolt our walls together…upright!

I have a few videos of our students moving the walls, which are linked here.

finishing cutting out our door frame (no, there will not be an actual door there, just a spot for one)

Wall 1 of 3 to be moved. This was the heaviest of the walls and did need 8 of us to get it moved. It was tricky working our way past the fence.

We started the move with 6 students…quickly we added more when we realized how heavy it actually was.

It took us a while before we realized to have a balanced number of people on each side.

finishing touches on our nails for our last wall

double checking screws and nails

It takes a lot of people to saw two pieces of wood out for a door frame.

Lucky number 13!  It was a day in which we started off with such promise.  The sun was shinning, the kids were listening, everything appeared headed for the best!  And then…it rained.  This is our first work day when we encountered rain.  Many of use did not have jackets (even against whatever warning I made the day before) so work moved along slowly.  We still make progress and are now 2/4 completed with our walls.

finishing the 2nd wall with a securing of our last stud

cutting a sister stud for our door frame

In the second half of our class, we worked on our self reflections.  Students completed a self-assessment of our blog post to date; using a particular rubric that focuses on three skills: documentation, reflection, and communication/collaboration.  Please feel free to look at the standards and rubric.  Each student uses the standards as a guide for filling out their rubric.  Once they complete their rubric, they make corrections to their blog post.  Additionally, I will then provide comments/feedback on their rubric.  We then meet (each student and myself) to discuss their rubric version compared to mine.  From there, at Student Led Conferences, each student will use their rubric to focus on what they have done well, what areas of improvement they have, and how to improve in the future on these three main skills.

The first part of our day was back into the Makerspace for some practice.  We have struggled immensly when it comes to hammering in nails correctly.  Half our nails end up splitting the stud (that is more an accuracy problem in that we are not lining our nail up correctly) and the other half end up deforming (because we are not hitting the nail correctly).  A very small portion of our nails actually do what we want them to do so we have to go back and practice.

Each student got 4 nails, each one differing in size.  We started with 1 inch nails and worked our way up to 3 inch nails.  Each student had to hit and remove each nail successfully and straight before moving on.  Below are some samples of some of the work we were doing!

The second part of our day was just working on the walls…same old.  We are nearing completion with the construction of the walls though.  Our goal for the end of the day is to finish all of them (lofty I know…but who knows).

moving a nearly finished wall out of the way