Students at Guelph Lake PS build model canoe
March 7, 2023
GUELPH, ON — A group of nine female students at Guelph Lake Public School became the core group to take the bow and lead the STEM project of building a model size canoe.
Last week on Monday and Tuesday, students Vanessa, Sadie, Payton, Sophie, Zoe, Carissa, Caiya, Miranda, and Emma went around to different classrooms to present their experience building the model canoe to other students.
“We started by preparing the presentation then as a group we met up and practiced our presentation and how to word everything in it. Then we all signed our names on a sheet and decided who was doing what class,” said Sadie.
Their teacher, David Kaufman, said that the time spent working on the canoe totalled more than 100 hours; the group would come in for an hour each day, five days a week from October 2022 to February 2023.
Kaufman hoped that from this project that the students would have “a lasting memory.”
“You’ll always remember the time you spent building a canoe in school,” Kaufman said.
Kaufman himself said he always enjoyed building things when he was younger and into his adult years and that through this project he hoped students would develop confidence using different tools and building things by hand.
Which students expressed that they did, “I had fun learning new skills such as the fibreglass and epoxy coating and having my friends there with me made it all the more enjoyable,” said Miranda.
The group of students and Kaufman plan to organize a day where they take the canoe and launch it onto water on the pond located at the back of their school. Kaufman said they plan to load the canoe with teddy bears and demonstrate to students that the canoe can float and operate as its intended use despite being a smaller scale.
The group is unsure what they might build next, but after its launch the group has plans to hang the canoe in their school’s foyer as a light fixture for all current and future students to see.
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