Children are innate builders. Give them some play dough and they will surprise you with their imagination. Building of this innate skills helps them understand and explore some fundamental engineering principles.
What’s even more encouraging is that you do not necessarily require any building sets or construction boxes for these Structure Building STEM ideas. You might have them already! So if you have play dough, index cards, pencils, jenga tiles, rubber bands handy, then you are all set some Engineering fun with your kids.
Structure Building STEM Ideas
1. Stack some pencils and see if you can pencil structure. Switch triangular pencils with usual circular ones at the base to make the moving structures.
2. Check the stability on the pencil structure up stacking Jenga tiles or Index cards.
3. You can also stack Jenga titles to make miniature versions of well known structures.
4. Use play dough (like cement) between Jenga tiles to see if that increases the stability of the structures.
5. Combine pencils, jenga, index cards together to make one of a kind building.
6. Make a building with parking lot by placing index cards over the base. See if it can handle the load by building a structure above the card.
These are a few ideas but your child’s imagination is limitless. Encourage your kid to explore more loose material around the house for engineering and construction play.
Skills Learned and Enhanced:
- Fine Motor Skills
- Focus and Observation
- Hand and Eye coordination
- Critical Thinking Skills
- Math and problem solving skills
- Imagination and Creativity
- Weight and Balance Skills
These fun and challenging structure building STEM ideas lay the foundation for a natural science & math acumen. These open-ended structure building STEM ideas also help young children look beyond the instructions, quiz their own minds, problem solve and observe their surrounding better.
Explore More:
Skills Children need for Future and How to Nurture Them
16 Ways to Boost your Child’s Spatial Reasoning Skills
Pom-Pom Shooter STEM Engineering Challenge