Designing Foil People

In this lesson, children will create foil people as they learn design and building techniques.

This lesson will help children meet the following educational standards:

Develop beginning skills in the use of engineering practices such as observing, asking questions, solving problems, and drawing conclusions
Understand important connections and concepts in engineering

After this lesson, children should be more proficient at:

Expressing wonder and curiosity about their world by asking questions, solving problems and designing things
Developing and using models to represent their ideas, observations and explanations through approaches such as drawing, building or modeling with clay
Using nonstandard and standard scientific tools for investigation
Becoming familiar with technological tools that can aid in scientific inquiry

Explain that the children will experiment with constructing figures out of aluminum foil.
Say: There are many possible shapes and sizes of people and many poses to put them in. Today we are going learn how to make a basic foil person.
Watch the video: "How to Make Foil People"

Pass out one aluminum foil sheet to each child.
Say: "Remember how Miss Nicole, the teacher in the video, laid the aluminum foil sheet flat on the table with the long edges on the side and the short edges on the top and bottom? We are going to do the same thing. Then we are going to draw one line on the bottom and two on the top, just like Miss Nicole did in the video."
Say: "Cut the foil sheet from the center of the bottom edge about 1/3 of the way up toward the center to create the legs—just like Miss Nicole did in the video."
Say: "Now let's turn our paper and cut the two lines that will make the foil person's arms and head, just like Miss Nicole did in the video."
Carefully scrunch the foil in the stomach to form a torso. Then do the same to form a head, arms and legs.
Say: Now fold up the ends of the arms and legs to make hands and feet.
As the children experiment with making foil people, they can try creating different poses and bigger people.
Give the children some time to continue molding their foil people, guided by their imaginations.
The foil person can stand, sit or run.
Arms up or arms down.

Engineering Explorers