Book Review: 100 Easy STEAM Activities

There are so many great STEM and STEAM activities out there, and I love having books of activities around so my child can choose something she wants to do rather than me having to direct or suggest activities all the time (she’s 10, so she has a good idea of what sounds interesting or fun to her).

100 Easy STEAM Activities by Andrea Scalzo Yi of Raising Dragons is a great collection of low-prep projects that are lots of fun for kids and help them learn while keeping them entertained.

Some of the categories in the book include:

Simple science experiments
Achievable technology ideas (aka coding without computers)
Easy engineering challenges
Accessible art projects
No problem math activities
Toddler STEAM play activities
Seasonal STEAM activities
Sensory STEAM ideas

In all there are 100 different activities, a lot of which you can probably do with materials you have in your house or with a quick trip to the store. Most are great for elementary school aged kids, except of course for the toddler activities.

Each project is rated from one to three beakers in terms of difficulty, so it’s easy to pick things that are perfect for your kids’ skill level.

A few projects at random to give you a taste: Paint your name in binary code, Playdough maze, Calm down building block sensory bottle, Crayon resist leaf prints, Raised salt painting, Fraction animals, Magic pepper experiment.

While lots of these you may have seen before, the beauty of a book version is that you and your kids can flip through it at random when “I’m bored” hits, or if there’s something specific you want to focus on that day. It’s a lot of fun for little artists, engineers, mathematicians and kids in general.

Learn more about the book at her website.

About the book: 192 pages, paperback, 100 activities. Published by Page Street Publishing, suggested retail price $19.99.

Check out our Online store for special buys on Educational gifts We find bulk items and end-of-stock supplies to bring you heavily discounted items. (make sure you check our store often so you don’t miss out on new stock). We also have some free printable files, including a Science PDF for learning about Microscopes.

After sharing some witch themed math activities, I found a bunch more fun printable worksheets with a Halloween theme for kids to try, so let’s take a look at some more low-prep Halloween learning fun.

Give kids practice measuring bats, spiders, ghosts and more with these printables from What I Have Learned Teaching. Kids can use a ruler, unit cubes or even little Halloween themed erasers to measure and track the size of the images.

Practice symmetry by drawing half a haunted house, ghost, skull or other simple images with this activity from Printables Hub.

I always love a good roll and draw activity, too, so check out this roll and draw a ghost activity (which has printable instructions) from Finding Myself Young.

Missy Printable Design has a cute set of Halloween worksheets for preschool, including tracing the letter H and a haunted house, spider counting, number tracing, sequencing, coloring pages and more.

The Halloween themed printables from The Artisan Life are meant to be playdough mats, and you can definitely use them for that to make the shape and trace the letters. But you could also use pipe cleaners or Wikki Stix, or line up buttons or anything else on them.

Older kids will enjoy this witch’s brew logic puzzle from Education.com. The witch has made different potions with different colors that do different things, and using the clues you can figure out which one is which. (Don’t worry; there’s an answer key included if you can’t figure it out on your own!)

Another fun puzzle is this decoder activity from Crafting Cheerfully. The holiday icons each represent a letter, and kids can use the decoder to answer the riddle. This isn’t a free resource (and the link in the post is broken but you can find it here) but it includes 20 riddles and an editable file so you can make up your own codes to decipher.

Have you read?

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