Construction work outside North Barrington Elementary School led to a special math class for the pupils inside.
For five months, 4th graders at the District 220 school have had a front-row seat to watch their new building being constructed outside the window of their classroom. And with all the commotion came questions.
Curious about the new school building that will replace the one they are in, the pupils recently got a lesson from the project manager, Jeff Masters of Gilbane Building Co.
Masters took off his hard hat recently to field questions about the number of construction workers needed to complete the work, the ultimate size of the school, the number of bricks and the cost of the project.
Masters told the class that 40 people are working on the new school, a 63,000-square-foot building that will use 83,000 bricks and cost roughly $8 million.
The class also was curious about how the crew would be able to complete the project on time given bad weather such as the blizzard that destroyed a 50-foot portion of the wall in March.
The wall itself was part of the inspiration for the class. After the wall fell, two pupils decided to check on the crew daily. Each day they make a field trip to the site.
Their curiosity led 4th-grade teacher Suzan Widmar to invite Masters into the classroom to teach geometry.
His lesson explained how construction workers use square feet to calculate how much manpower and material will be needed to complete a job.
Masters brought in bricks and tiles so that pupils could experiment with such calculations.
Each pupil was given a floor plan that listed the length and width of each room. But even with calculators, some pupils had a hard time figuring out how many bricks would be needed to build one wall of the outdoor living science center.
Nine-year-old Scott Holloway arrived at one conclusion based on the construction lessons.
After talking with workers one cold morning, Scott vowed to “stay in school, or else this is the job I’ll be doing, outside in the cold.”