Preschool Activity : Building Structures

Guest Post by    This post is written and shared by Emma at Science Sparks.  A simple, fun activity to do with a variety of ages and skill levels.  And you probably have everything you need right in your pantry!

  

When I brought out the spaghetti and marshmallows I think my children thought we were having some kind of weird and wonderful [to them] dinner!

In actual fact we were looking at structures and how to make them stable.

This is a great activity for children of most ages as you can tailor it to their understanding. I let my 2 year old just build whatever she wanted, and she had a great time working out how to put the spaghetti in the right places. With my 4 year old we were a bit more structured and tried to build a tower.

What you need:

Spaghetti [uncooked!]

Marshmallows

What to do:

Snap the spaghetti into smaller pieces.

Push the ends of the spaghetti into the marshmallows to build different shapes for your tower.

We started with a cube but when we put weight [Pooh bear in our case] on, it started to lean very precariously to the right and one of the spaghetti vertical pieces snapped.  We then discussed what we would do to make it stronger. We decided to add some diagonal pieces which seemed to do the trick.

We thought it would then be quite good fun to mess about trying lots of different shapes and see if we could break them.  Straight lines and marshmallow corners tend to lead pretty much to triangles but we had a lot of fun with other shapes too.

The Science Bit:

Cubes tend to make stable structures, especially if they have diagonal pieces to strengthen the sides.

------------------------------------

Science sparks is run by Emma and Kerry, who are trying to make science fun for parents and children. They both have science degrees, but are now stay at home mums with three small children each. Science Sparks is full of fun science activities that can mostly be done with things you already have around the house.

Current sponsors :  Fudoo Boards  :  A Mom with a Lesson Plan  :  CraftProjectIdeas.com
Design your own party invitations at Vistaprint.com