Build a Da Vinci Bridge with Your Kids

My daughter’s school has a tinkering lab where the kids get to go to do STEM stuff, build things and work on projects.

Recently one of the classes made a giant Da Vinci bridge, a self-supporting bridge design developed by Leonardo Da Vinci around 1486.

Their version was made with large pieces of wood and stands several feet high, but if you’d like to make a smaller-scale version, check out this tutorial from Frugal Fun for Boys and Girls.

Her version is made with craft sticks, and you do have to glue them together in advance to make pieces that are long enough to build the bridge from, but other than that the bridge can be put together without adhesives, and it makes a really strong structure, too.

This is a great engineering project for kids, and you could give them the materials and see if they can figure out how to make a bridge out of them before showing them how Da Vinci did it. You can also test your bridge to see how much weight it holds, and talk about why such a bridge might be useful (the original application was meant to be for use in war, so the army could build a bridge, cross it with their supplies and take it down easily so the enemy couldn’t follow).

Have you ever made a Da Vinci bridge? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo: Frugal Fun for Boys and Girls.]

With little kids especially, linking learning to physical activity really does help them learn. Movement can help kids focus, and it just keeps them from sitting still all day, which isn’t good for anyone.

The good news is lots of different learning activities can be adopted to get kids moving while they learn, so let’s look at some math and number activities that use gross motor skills.

Probably the most obvious thing would be hopscotch, which helps kids count while they hop. You can also mix up the numbers, do skip counting with the numbers, give kids a simple math problem and have them hop to the correct answer, and on and on.

This number hop game from Gift of Curiosity is a more chaotic version, with number flash cards on the floor that kids can hop, skip or jump to as you call them out (this one is more for individual number identification than counting). It’s a great indoor option if it’s too hot, cold or rainy out to do traditional hopscotch, too.

This painter’s tape number line idea from Days with Grey doesn’t involve quite as much movement, but kids can move around while they place things on the number line and work on learning about one to one correspondence. In the blog post they use shoes, but you can count anything you’ve got handy. (Be warned when I visited this website had an ad that continually took up the whole page, but you can get the idea pretty quickly.)

One of the important tasks of learning numbers is learning a parent’s phone number just in case it’s ever needed, or how to dial 911 in case on an emergency. Teaching Mama has a great way to practice telephone numbers and get some movement in with a giant telephone keypad made out of paper plates. You can also use this for counting practice, but it’s a great idea for learning phone numbers, too.

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