Many people email and ask how to put together an igloo.  To answer this, I must first say that you don't really need directions [and I have none to offer].  All you need is a general idea of what you want the igloo to look like, a bit of imagination, lots of milk jugs, a HIGH temperature hot-glue gun, glue sticks (high temp, LONG glue sticks), and a bit of patience.  :-)

Our igloo was made using roughly 535 jugs.  We could sit in the igloo as a class of 12 KINDERGARTEN students (plus teacher).  I don't have the dimensions of our igloo, although, the next time I make one, I plan on measuring it so that I will know how large it was!  :-) 

Just a Few Igloo Facts

[An excerpt from our Classroom Newsletter]

We started collecting jugs at the end of October.

Many students shared that their neighbors and extended families were also involved in the collecting of milk jugs

We started the construction phases just before Winter break.

We had originally planned to collect 155 milk jugs.  We thought 155 jugs would do the job nicely.

 As we collected the jugs, students helped to remove the caps, allowing the jugs to air dry.

We observed that sour milk turns bright green!  Yesterday, we noticed that sour milk jugs smell terrible!

When we were ready to construct, students counted jugs, reunited jugs with their caps, and helped form the shape of the igloo (a rainbow).

As rows were added, the igloo began to expand (outward!).

Somehow the Advocate found out about our igloo and came and took pictures of us. 

We were in the newspaper two times! 

We’ve had classes and many staff members come to see our creation.

We finished this past weekend.

Although the igloo looks a bit lopsided, it is very sturdy.  We can easily move it around!

We took off all the caps yesterday and grouped them into groups of 10.  Once we had a group of 10, we put the group into a Ziploc.  

We practice counting by tens. 

We had a total of 50 groups of 10, which is the same as 5 groups of 100.

We noticed that some of the jugs didn’t have caps, because the openings were glued into the bottoms of other jugs for our “entry way” or tunnel into the igloo. 

We also purposefully left on a few of the caps, due to the terrible smell some of the jugs were giving off!

All in all, we figured that nearly 35, give or take a few jugs, didn’t have caps that we could count.

That gives us a total of 535 jugs used!

Note: Margin of error ⁺/- 7 jugs!