Design Challenge: Craft Stick Trebuchet

There are so many fun things you can do with craft sticks, and giving your kids design challenges and a stack of sticks and other supplies is a great way to get them thinking, engineering and making hypotheses.

I love this idea for constructing a craft stick trebuchet from Frugal Fun for Boys and Girls. She gives the step by step for how to make it, and offers lots of ideas for how to make it into an engineering challenge, such as using balls of different weights, using a longer or shorter arm on the trebuchet and launching your projectile from different places on the arm.

Check her site for printable observation logs as well. This looks like so much fun!

Have you ever made one? I’d love to hear about it.

[Photo: Frugal Fun for Boys and Girls.]

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Valentine's Day STEM Activities

I’m in deep denial about the fact that new year is almost upon us again! It’s been the fastest and the longest year at the same time, and I can look back and see some good things as well as some things I wish had gone differently.

Doing a year in review with your kids — whether in the classroom or at home — is a good way to capture some of their memories and the things they really liked about the year gone by.

There are a lot of different printable year in review worksheets you can use if you want to make this super easy. Here are links to a few (often part of larger posts about NYE celebrations with kids that are worth a read, too):

Teach Beside Me has lots of fun printables fro the end of the year, including a year in review that covers favorite memory, funniest memory and the best book they read, among other topics.
NurtureStore‘s version has space for a self-portrait and prompts like favorite toy, best day out this year and future dream job.
Remember favorites, their “best idea” of the year and have room for setting goals for next year with this one from The Keele Deal.
The year in review from Yes We Made This has room for drawing or writing and includes things like something they learned, a memory they made and a place they visited.

Of course you could pretty easily make your own year in review for the whole family to do that asks questions based on what you most want to remember. (Favorite video game? Best friend? Favorite family memory?)

And if after the year in review you’re ready to look ahead a bit, Mrs. Merry has new year’s resolution printables to inspired kids to look ahead and set goals for things they want to try. You can totally fill this one out as a grownup, too.

[Photo: Mrs. Merry]

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