For this project each student in third grade has selected a state or national park to learn more about.   As they read and research in the classroom  they will be  identifying the Seven Wonders of their place.  They will be collecting information and writing about each of the Wonders at school.  They will also be deciding on a symbol for each of their identified wonders.  Finding “wonders” can be a little tricky.  Your children may need your help with this.  The wonders they find will be different from the Wonders that Eben found in The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs and they may be different from the wonders we found in North Hampton. In each of those projects, the children learned the stories behind the wonders.  That won’t be as obvious with this project. “Wonders” could be famous people, animals common to that habitat, an important regional food, or well known song.   In the classroom the children will write about these wonders as if they are publishing in a guide book to accompany a salt dough map showing the location of each wonder.

Once most of the wonders have been identified, we are hoping that the children will have your help to create a float.  The floats need to move along the downstairs hallway.  The states and the national parks will enter according the state’s ratification dates.  Some of them will be traveling a long way before they enter the gym where families will be waiting to see them so they need to be constructed carefully. Floats can be worn, pulled or pushed.

Students have made sandwich boards, pulled floats on skateboards, wagons or scooter boards or pushed them on stands or carts.  In the past some children have used rolling coolers or suitcases as their bases.  Please use what works best for you.  The floats do have to meet certain size requirements (all this will be sent home on a grading rubric in mid May) so all will be able to travel along the route and so all floats can be seen.  The children are encouraged to do as much of the work on their own as they can, but we know often their ideas need the guidance of experience and to be tempered with practicality. We hope these images give you some ideas and answer some of your questions.  Please let me know if you have any other questions or wonderings.  I will be happy to see what we can do to answer them.