Mrs. Topping’s class donned their architect hats last week. As part of their engineering unit they read, Twenty-One Elephants and Still Standing by April Jones Prince. It tells the true story of the 14 year construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. At first, people were intimidated by its size, worried about its strength and questioned how long it would last. This lead P.T. Barnum, founder of “The Greatest Show on Earth” to march his elephants through Manhattan and over the bridge to Brooklyn to show just how magnificent a structure it was. Our class worked in small groups and used the design process to construct bridges to hold 21 toy elephants. After lots of planning, testing, and revising, all bridges successfully supported the elephants. It took lots of team work, but they had a lot of fun and learned a great deal about problem solving and the design process!