In Year 2 we’ve been problem solving. After making snazzy houses out of cardboard, we decided we wanted to them stand up so we could make a mini London. It turns out that making flat houses stand alone is tricky and we really had to think hard about how we were going to make this work. We’ve been doing lots of work in groups and pairs recently and realising how much we can learn from each other when we collaborate. Working together really helped us to come up with a solution – after lots of trial and error!

We have been learning about Samuel Pepys and, thanks to his diaries, all about the plague and the Great Fire of London. Once our houses were standing up by themselves, we were delighted to have recreated London in the 1600s. Some of us got very excited about communication and used masking tape to make phone lines to connect each house. We were very keen on all our imaginary inhabitants being able to communicate.

The day after we created the telephone lines, we had a look at a timeline which showed today’s date, the 1600s and when the telephone was invented. We quickly realised that it was impossible for our 1600s London to have telephone lines when telephones were invented over 200 years after the Great Fire of London! We decided, unanimously, that we would quickly remove them and make our London as authentic as possible.

We are finding that even though we came up with some fantastic solutions for make the houses stand, they are not as sturdy as we would like them to be. We are going to make some sturdier houses this week which look a bit more like the houses that were around in Samuel’s time. Watch this space!