Little J is initially scared to approach the ‘monster’ in the back yard. Encouraged to face his fears, he vows to catch the frilly-necked monster and sets about building a monster trap with the help of Levi.

Elaborate - Sequence steps for making designed solutions and working collaboratively.

Theme - MONSTER

Design Brief

Design and construct a frilly-necked monster costume or toy.

• Purpose:
  For the school fete: The class has a stall titled, ‘The Day of the Frilly-necked Monster’.
• Materials:
  paper, cardboard, play dough, fabric, fibre, lego/duplo, food, recycled materials, etc.
• Construction techniques:
  student’s choice to produce a three-dimensional product.

Students could work in pairs to design and construct their imaginary monster for a class stall and/or parade. Construction builds both fine and gross motor skills, coordination and metacognition. View Kid Engineer: The design process

Using the design process, ask students to develop ideas and solutions prior to beginning to model or construct their frilly-necked monster:

• Design:
  • Define the need
  • Brainstorming
  • Designing the solution
• Make:
  • Develop scaled drawings
  • Make smaller models to test mechanics
• Build:
  • test, evaluate and re-design
• Evaluate:
  • share the design and receiving feedback

Once students have completed their frilly-necked monster, ask the class to reflect on the process they used to design and construct the design solution and answer the following questions:

• What do I like/dislike about it?
• How would I improve my design?

The illustrations and the explanations should be entered into their Design journal.

Suggested resources: For reference, students could adapt these dragon templates and construction techniques:

• Box head dragon 
• Chinese Dragon Mask
• Make a Chinese dragon