Bey Blades come to life in room 109

For a couple of weeks now we have had quite a few of our boys very interested in making and playing with Bey Blades. I know my own boys loved these toys when they were younger. It's something about the spinning that is quite mesmerizing.

The boys in my class are obsessed with the battle aspect, so in the hopes of taking the aggression out of the classroom I began to ask them questions about which model they thought would spin the longest? This lead to some thoughts about heavy and light, bigger and smaller.

The students started creating their own Bey Blades using Lego and snap cubes.








When the Bey Blades starting popping up I had encouraged the kiddos to make a plan about what their Bey Blade would look like and write a sentence about their personal creation.











Then they took these into battle. We created an arena using a table and the kiddos decided to put chairs around to stop the toys from spinning off.




We created a chart for them to keep track of the winning Blade using a tally score sheet.

Tally chart.





The new stadium.

Several days later the kiddos wanted to make Bey Blades again, so I encouraged them to think of a different type of arena for their play.They soon got out some blocks and boards to create an open arena for their battles.


This is when I began to introduce the concept of  timing the length of each spin. With this introduction the kiddos began looking at a clock to see the movement of a second hand instead of counting using their own time meter.




Again several days later, with the Bey Blades still going strong, some of the kiddos started building really big Blades. I questioned them as to which ones they thought would spin for the longest time?
J.L. Mine will because it is smaller.
Ms. C. Why do you think it will spin for a longer time?
J.L. Because the other one is heavier.
J.S. Beacause the big one will tip over.

We started spinning them and J.L. was right. The bigger heavy Blades didn't spin as long.
 
As the Blades were spinning we noticed they all made the same shape. They all looked like a circle when spinning even though all the Blades were made using different shapes.

       J.S. Mine looks like a fan.
       P.L. It also looks like a windmill.


We are now creating a Bay Blade inquiry book where the kiddos can pose more questions in the "I wonder ..." section. We will also be encouraging the kiddos to put their "I think ..." statements as well to capture their theories.

Looking forward to see where this takes us next!