Parents joined their third-grade students in the classrooms on Thursday for a hands-on challenge to build bridges between desks. The project was a follow-up to their study of fiction and non-fiction books, using some out-of-the-box problem solving and showing how the two literary genres can be combined into one creative activity.

Each student-parent team was challenged to design and build a bridge that would cross a 12-inch space between two desks and would be strong enough to hold at least 10 packages of notecards for two minutes. They were limited to five types of simple materials, six tools, and were given parameters such as “the packages of notecards cannot rest on a desk” and “attach a flag with the names of your group members.”

“I think it’s gonna work!” Lori Schwabenhausen declared to her son, Marcus Andriano, when their bridge was almost complete in Nancy Loyd’s classroom. Next door in Marsh Hayes’s room, Henry Bearden told his mom, Vanessa, “I think these should be in the bottom in the middle,” suggesting that they add support to make their bridge stronger. Across the hall in Jane Whitely’s class, Finlay Hughes and his dad, Neil, had successfully completed the bridge challenge and moved on to the second project. A few desks down, Amelia Ann Callis and her dad, Todd, tested their bridge with the packets of notecards, and it was still wobbly, so they went to work adding reinforcement.

The classes had read two books in preparation for this big event. Crossing the New Bridge by Emily Arnold McCully is a folktale that deals with a tradition about crossing a new bridge. Twenty-One Elephants and Still Standing by April Jones Prince is based on the true story of the newly-built Brooklyn Bridge. The third-grade teachers devised this clever project to tie multiple concepts together and to include parents in the classrooms for a fun activity.