Our Mud Hut Adventure!

What a day P2/3 have had!  As part of our 'House and Homes' topic we have been investigating mud huts and trying to build our very own.  Thanks to Darci, Jack and James who brought in the required materials we had a fantastic day of practical learning and experimenting.

It all started when we were reading a book about different types of houses and we wondered why we didn't have any mud huts here in Northern Ireland.  We decided to build our own to see if we could work out the reason why.

After getting into groups we first set about making a structure.  Some of us used straws and playdough, others used twigs and wool.  This was much trickier than we first thought but through working together we managed to build the first step of our mud huts.

Next came the fun part!  We all enjoyed getting REALLY messy as we mixed the soil, straw and water together.  We quickly learned that too much water didn't work as the mixture became very sloppy and wouldn't stand up.  Too little water and the mixture was much too crumbly so we had to be very careful! 

After much trial and error we all completed some form of a mud hut but did this answer our question? What did we discover?  We got together after the activity to have a chat about our findings and discovered that although we did make a mud hut we didn't think it would last too long.  This is because when the soil dried out it crumbled and when we poured water on it (N. Ireland has a LOT of rain!) the walls became soft and fell down.

It's safe to say that whilst we learned quite a lot about the building of a mud hut we won't be building any life-size versions any time soon.

We really enjoyed our investigation and hope you enjoy our photos.