Milk Jug Igloo

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 and don’t plan on making another one anytime soon.  There just isn’t enough time…!

A Few Igloo Facts:

• 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 as we thought that would do the job nicely.

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

• We observed that sour milk turns bright green!  A day later we noticed that sour milk jugs smell horrible!

• When we were ready to construct, students counted jugs, reunited jugs with their caps, and helped form the igloo’s shape.

• As we added rows, the igloo began to expand (outwardly!).

• Somehow the Door County Advocate found out about our igloo (they wouldn’t disclose the “source”) and took pictures!

• We were in the newspaper two times!!

• We had many staff members and classrooms come to see our creation.

• Although the igloo looks a bit lopsided, it is VERY sturdy.  We can easily move it to different locations in our classroom.

• When we were finished with the igloo, we took off all the caps and grouped them into groups of 10.

• We put 10 groups of 10 together, practicing counting by tens.

• We had 50 groups of 10.  That’s the same as 5 groups of 100!

• We noticed that some of the jugs didn’t have caps, because the opening were glued into the bottoms of other jugs (door).

• We also purposefully left on a few 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.

• We are fairly sure we used a total of 535 jugs!