To the second grade class at Striar Hebrew Academy in Sharon (SHAS), taking a trip to Gillette Stadium last week was exciting, despite the disappointing end to the Patriots' season.

That's because the students have worked for months on building their own model of the stadium, and got to share it on Wednesday, Jan. 23, with members of the Patriots organization.

The project began as a free-time activity, the students having decided to make a football field to use for a game. Upon seeing the students’ enthusiasm and initiative to build a football field on their own, second grade teacher Cindy Yanofsky created the educational plan to build Gillette Stadium, not only as a class project but as a base for learning math, science, reading, writing, and social skills.

As the students construct the field, goal posts, seating, scoreboard, replay screens, lighting and towers, they are learning second-grade skills:  measuring, working with fractions, addition and subtraction of multi-digit numbers, planning, redrafting, building to scale, reading (of rules and game strategies, about players and the stadium), vocabulary building, proper use of lower and upper case letters (such as when printing words and numbers on the field and on the scoreboard), and the need for integrity in produced work.

At a specially planned visit to Gillette Stadium on Wednesday, the students presented their stadium design to representatives from Gillette, including an architect, engineer and construction Vice President.

Each presentation included details of a part of the stadium that the student had worked on, how he reworked it as necessary, and then his responses to any questions that were posed by the Gillette personnel. Then they listened as the men described how Gillette was made, how many plans they developed, that the planning took two years and that the final construction took another four years. They showed the students blueprints and enlarged photos.

The tour then included the club seating inside and out, the field itself, the passageways under the stadium, a movie about the Patriots and the Hall of Fame.