10 Easy STEM Activities Your Kids Will Love

Top Simple STEM Challenges

It all started with a bag of cups and some tape. Blue painters tape can change your child's life, especially if they've been blessed with an imagination. Why not give that creative energy some direction? After you have gathered some basic materials, you are ready to start some simple STEM challenges!

 

Easy STEM Building challenges

Building challenges are easily accessible. You can use a variety of materials and get totally different results. Some fun ones to try:

• books
• cups
• dice
• sand
• pipe cleaners
• LEGOs
• empty recyclable containers
• deck of playing cards

Ask some questions to get your kids to explore the challenge more: What happens if the base is narrower than the top? Is this tower strong enough to support your weight? What about the weight of a small book or toy? Is there one spot on the structure you could touch or push and have the whole thing come crashing down? What happens if you mix the materials in the structure? Will it still work?

 

Explore Force & Motion with these STEM challenges

Experience gravity, drag, and friction with these fun STEM challenges. Start with a paper airplane. Learn the basics of making good folds and creases. Try out your design with some modifications. Questions to ask: What happens when you add weights like paper clips or pennies, cut flaps at the back of the wings and fold them up, or change the material (try it with small light paper or even big newspaper)? What is the longest distance or time you can make the airplane fly? Can you make it fly in a loop?

Use cardboard tubes or paper to create a marble run. Questions to ask: Can you make it take a specific amount of time for the marble to reach the bottom in a repeatable way? What happens as you change the angles of your tubes? Does the size of the marble change the speed at which it completes the run?

What about a car ramp for a toy car? Can you make it so the car stops when it gets to the bottom? What happens if you add a jump into the ramp? Will the car land on its wheels or flip?

 

Use hard boiled or plastic eggs and design a container that protects them. Can you drop it from the seat of a chair and keep it safe? What about if you drop it from a table, a high shelf, or even off a second story? What are some ways of protecting the egg?

How far apart can you place the dominoes and have your domino chain reaction work? What if the dominoes are of a different size? Will they still fall over?

Get creative with STEM and STEAM

Sometimes it's fun to get outside and get messy! Make a simple bubble solution with water, dish detergent, and corn syrup (a lot of water, much less dish soap, even less corn syrup - the amounts vary in recipes I've found but if you fill a pitcher most of the way with water, put in about a half cup of dish soap, and about an eighth of a cup of corn syrup it works pretty well. These proportions are less than what I have found online but if it isn't working for you just up the dish soap or corn syrup). Use pipe cleaners or straws and try to make a bubble wand! Questions to ask: can you make a bubble into a shape other than a sphere? What's the biggest bubble you can create?

For rainy days or when you just want to go digital, head to your favorite drawing program. Try to create symmetry art or a fun word cloud with your favorite science words!

If you are looking to go deeper into STEM exploration, I have a set of 10 challenges that include more details about the set up, as well as key engineering vocabulary terms and graphic organizers to record the process. You can can an idea of what they are like at my guest post on Minds in Bloom - there is even a graphic organizer you can download and print to get you started!

What are your favorite easy STEM activities? Want to save these ideas for later? Pin them with this graphic:

Flag Fun with LEGOs!

Build Flags of the World with LEGOs

My kiddo year old disappeared for awhile yesterday afternoon. I heard the sound of  LEGO digging, and when he emerged, he had made two flags out of LEGOs. We had just started tracking the Olympic medals in the morning, and he ran with the theme to create some adorable LEGO flags! He started with 5, but I had a feeling I would be seeing more of these over the next few weeks.

What is so great about these LEGO flags is that they can be really simple to make (see the flags on the left in the image below)! You can also get a little more creative and complicated, as with the ones above. Hopefully you can catch the details if you want to duplicate our flag designs.

This is especially fun to do while the Olympics are going on, but really any time you are learning about different countries around the world. Which flags would be the hardest to make with LEGOs? See what your kids come up with!

LEGO Pro tip - try buying LEGOs in bulk, either locally from craigslist or a similar-type Facebook group, or shop online at shopgoodwill.com and try to wait for a good deal. You'll have to wash and sort them (this can take awhile), but it's always been worth it for us. I aim for $5-7/pound but if you can tell there are a lot of good pieces in there, it might be worth more.

Looking for more LEGO activities or tips? Click below to go to

LEGO Tips and Activities

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you enjoyed this LEGO geography activity!

Turn this activity into a learning opportunity

If you want to give this activity a more structured feel or use it in a classroom, I hope you will consider this resource I put together. Not only do students learn about another country and culture, they need to use critical thinking skills to create the flags. There are 36 flags and countries highlighted, though you can always create your own with this STEM Mats Activity for Flags:

Create Homemade Tree Blocks - Natural STEM Toy

Make your own DIY Tree Blocks 

Spring is a great time to make tree blocks. The bark is easy to get off of the branches in spring, and since this is the most time consuming part otherwise, it really makes sense to pencil this into your sprint calendar. If you have any trees that need trimming or can get a few branches off your local freecycle/craigslist/Facebook group, and you don't mind putting in some time and effort, you will end up with a beautiful set of tree blocks your children can play with for many years, and maybe even pass on to their own children!

We had an abundance of ash trees on our property, which were too crowded and not very happy. They worked well for this project, and we get much more enjoyment out of them as blocks than we did when they were trees.

Get started making your own tree blocks

• tree branches
• a saw
• an oven or a warm spot in the sun
• a putty knife or box cutter
• ample time and patience

Select your branches. I chose a mixture of thin and thick. You will want to cut them to various lengths, but I tried to cut several the same length so they would work well for building structures. You will probably want to keep them as flat as possible, too, so that if you are building towers they aren't topsy turvy. I used a miter saw, but you can use whatever you have and are comfortable with.

Before de-barking the tree blocks

After you cut them you will want them to dry out a bit; this should help get the bark off. I sun dried mine but you can put them in the oven on the lowest setting for a few hours instead. If you are really lucky, you might get a branch where the bark just falls right off. One of our maple trees just lost a branch and I thought it would be nice to make some more tree blocks to add to our ash ones. The whole bark-removing step, which was the most time consuming of our ash tree blocks last year, took me all of 2 minutes to de-bark an 8 foot long branch. It probably took me about 2 minutes per block last spring to de-bark the ash tree blocks. The other option is to leave the bark on, for a more natural look, and then all you need to do is cut them and sand the exposed surfaces!

drying in the sun

A year later, they still look great!

These blocks have so many uses and if you can find the wood for free and have the tools (or can borrow them), this is such an inexpensive project. Sets like this you can buy can run $40! Eek! To de-bark, I cut into the bark with a blade and then peeled it back with a putty knife or my fingernails. It was fairly time consuming, but I'm really happy with the result. After all of the bark was removed, I sanded all of the block first with coarse sandpaper, and then with fine sandpaper.

Why I think you'll LOVE these 

Not only are these blocks fun to play with, they are a wonderful natural building toy! The smooth wood and weight of them is really amazingly satisfying. Please note that because they are solid wood, they can be quite heavy, so take care with little toes and fingers.