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.]

I did a post earlier this year with activities and ideas for teaching the alphabet, but a lot or learning letters and recognizing them just has to do with seeing them and working with them a lot.

That means coloring, tracing, identifying things that start with different letters and more.

One way to reinforce the letters is through little activity books like these cute printable alphabet books from Life Over Cs.

These are available for free when you subscribe to her newsletter, and I’d say that’s well worth it if you have a little one (or a group of little ones!) working on the alphabet and letter recognition.

Each mini book includes a collection of things that start with that letter to color, color and read with words that start with the letter, tracing the letter, finding the letter in a grid and other coloring pages with objects that start with that letter.

These little books are super useful reinforcing the different letters and giving kids different activities related to the letters.

If you do a letter of the day or letter of the week you can use a new book for each one, and then keep the copies in your reading center or in a basket where kids can look at them again.

And of course you can add in all the other letter activities you like, go on a scavenger hunt for items that start with that letter, read alphabet books, practice writing letters in rice or with pompoms or playdough or whatever sensory activities you like.

You can grab the free printables when you enter you email address at Life Over Cs, and check out her other great alphabet resources and activities while you are over there.

Do you have favorite activities for teaching letters to kids? I’d love to hear about them!

[Photo: Life Over Cs]

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