Age guide: 4 to 10 years. Younger children will want a grown-up to be the “spotter”.
Building something and watching it fall is a good teacher. These four challenges ask children to build, predict and test. Each one uses things you can find at home, and none has one right answer.
Safety
Keep towers low enough that nobody climbs. Avoid glass and heavy tins. Coins and small weights are choking hazards, so use them only with children old enough not to mouth them, and supervise. Keep string short and never loop it around a neck.
1. The tallest kitchen tower
Time: 20 minutes. You need: plastic tubs, cardboard boxes, cardboard tubes, pans with lids, soft toys and a wall where you can mark heights.
Challenge your family to build the tallest tower they can from the odd collection of items. When it stands, they measure it with their hands, and you draw a line on paper stuck to the wall at that height. Write the names beside it. Try again tomorrow and see if the new tower beats the old line. Ask what made the best base.
2. The strongest bridge
Time: 30 minutes plus drying. You need: 50 lolly sticks, PVA glue and something to test with, such as coins or a small bag of rice.
Give a small team the sticks and the glue. Ask them to build a bridge that holds as much weight as possible. Show them a few ideas, like stacking, overlapping and weaving. Give them ten minutes. Before testing, they predict how many coins it will hold and write it on a chart. Once the glue is dry, add the weights one at a time until it collapses. Compare the guess to the result. For younger children, use a few large wooden blocks as weights.
3. Bottle bowling with a secret
Time: 15 minutes. You need: ten plastic bottles, different fillings such as pebbles, sand, water, crumpled paper and rice, and a ball.
Fill each bottle with something different, seal the lids tightly and tape them. Set them up like bowling pins. Ask which will be easiest to knock down, and why. Roll the ball and keep a tally of which fell. For a different experiment, keep the bottles the same and change the ball.
4. Ring toss with different rings
Time: 15 minutes. You need: three kinds of ring (short string, twisted foil and a paper plate with the middle cut out) and bottles filled with water.
Set the bottles in a triangle and mark a throwing line. Ask which ring will be easiest to land on a bottle, and why. Toss each kind several times and keep a tally on a chart. Try new ring materials too.
Making sense of results
Ask your child which test surprised them, and what they would change. If a tower fell, praise the idea, not just the height. For more on supporting a child through setbacks, see the bridge fell. What shall we try next?
