Santa Claus is Comin' to Town-He Needed Our Help!

The beginning of December means a lot of eight and nine year olds are excited everyday for Christmas, so it's best to use that excitement to my advantage! I created this unit to include three science standards, one social studies standard, and one writing standard. The kids (and myself) had a BLAST! This unit took four days to complete, and the outline for each day can be seen below.

Day 1: Each student received a letter, stating that last year on Christmas Eve things did not run smoothly. In order to make this year go right, our 3rd graders had to form elf teams to assist Santa to make sure he had a great journey. After reading the letter together, they had to sign saying that they accepted the challenge to help Santa!

Students gathered in their teams and created a name. Throughout the week they could earn points based on teamwork, creativity, and hard work! 

The first step to helping Santa was to make sure he knew what weather he would run into as he moved to different continents around the world. I had the students look up weather for four different locations around the world which included our hometown, McMurdo, Antartica, Curtin Springs, Australia, and London, United Kingdom. Using the website https://www.wunderground.com students can look up past weather for any date. For each city, they had to record past temperatures on Christmas Eve for the last three years. Based on that data, they then made a prediction for this year's temperature. 

After recording the temperatures, students had to color a continent map, showing where each location was. They also had to choose one location and use the temperatures to create a bar graph. 

Day 2: The second part to the challenge was creating a sleigh for Santa. It had to be a sleigh that would hold up to weather conditions, and hold a present. In order to build the sleigh each team received $100 that they could use to buy items at the Elf Shop. I used items that could easily allow students to build whatever came to their mind (I wanted to see their creativity!) I will say, in the end every single sleigh was different, and I couldn't help but smile when I heard the teams discussing what ideas they thought would work best. This day involved students drawing a blueprint for their sleigh, and planning a budget for the items they would need. 

 Day 3: Building begins! Creating a real-world experience, students visited the Elf Shop to purchase all of their items. They had to make sure they had enough money to buy the items, and they had to correctly tell me how much change they should receive back. One group in particular had a discussion that I kept listening to. One student wanted to spend all of the $100 at the beginning, buying anything they could need to build. Another student in the group wanted to save as much money as possible. This provided a great opportunity to discuss saving versus spending!

Day 4: Sleigh testing day! In order to make sure Santa has a good trip this year, students had to make sure their sleigh design could stand up to weather conditions.

First, the sleigh had to safely go down a ramp, without a present falling out.

Second, the sleigh had to stand upright while being hit with "rain" (squirting with water on all sides.) Teams got a bonus point if the present did not get wet.
















Lastly, the sleigh had to withstand "wind" (not tipping over when having air blown from a hairdryer.) If teams had a tie score after all three events, the tied teams had to have their sleigh test a "take-off." Where the sleigh had to successful use wind from the hairdryer to "fly" over the gap between two desks.













To end the unit, students had to answer the following questions in their science notebooks:

• What was the event our sleigh did best with? Why?
• What was the worst part of our design?
• What could we change to make our design better?
• Is it better to save or spend our budget? Why?

We had such a great week, and after sending our data to Santa, I think it is easy to say he will have a smooth trip this year after the hard work of some amazing third graders! :)