This week in year 1 we have been very busy with our exciting DT project, Taxi. This project is based around creating a London Taxi, linking in with our Bright Lights Big City topic and all of our London themed learning this half term.

We started off talking about ‘taxis’. What are they? What do they do? What features do they have? We concluded that a taxi is a type of transport.  It is a vehicle. We used lots of small world transport toys to help us compare the similarities and differences between different vehicles and began to evaluate what a taxi needs.  We discovered that some transport only has 2 wheels, like a bike but some have 3, like a trike. Some vehicles have different size wheels, like diggers and tractors, but some have wheels that are the same size, like cars and mopeds. We then looked at how all of these vehicles move when pushed, focusing specifically on the mechanism that make this happen. Our next step was to explore chassis, axels and wheels.

So what does a taxi need?

After lots of discussion and trialing of different types of cars and vehicles we decided that our Taxis needed…. 2 axles, 4 wheels lights, a ‘Taxi’ sign, windows, a number plate and would need to move when pushed. This then formed our ‘design criteria’ which we were able to plan our taxis from.

Once we had made our plans it was time to get to work making the Taxis.

When making our Taxi’s we needed to use saws to cut down the dowel which made our axels. This was a new skills that lots of us hadn’t tried before, but we were all really excited to give it a go and everyone was very resilient. We then followed our design to create our final pieces and they look AMAZING!

Well done year 1, our first full DT project. What a brilliant way to end the half term. You can see all of our Taxi’s below.

Happy Easter!