No, we're not talking about that wall; we're really talking about looking for patterns in the bricks of a wall.
It all started with a look at Thomas Jefferson's house at Monticello. We started by contrasting George Washington's house with Thomas Jefferson's. After studying how bricks are made now, and contrasting the process with the 18th century process, the class used actual bricks to form "pyramids" and then "grow" them, one level at a time. We recorded our observations while discovering some patterns in the data along the way.
Here was a fairly simple project, that took the project off a worksheet and made it real for fourth graders.