Hi Guys,
On days the kids in our county have off from school, my library plans No School Activities. These can be movies, crafts, game days, activities. Today’s No School Activity was actually planned to coincide with the Maryland STEM Festival.
The Maryland STEM Festival is a ten day long collaborative effort by schools, science centers, libraries and more to provide science, technology, engineering and math based activities to Maryland communities. This is my library’s second year being part of the STEM festival.
This year we did a STEM craft incorporating force, motion and optical illusion. Thanks to makeandtakes and agirlwithagluegun we made our own DIY spinners.
First thing I did was gather my supplies: cardboard, paper, glue sticks, scissors, hold punch, rope cording (knitting string will work), and crayons. For my kids, which tend to run younger no matter how high you put the age limit, I pre-cut and pre-hole punched the cardboard.
I created my own circular patterns on different colored paper so that the kids would have bright fun colors to work with. They created their own patterns, cut out their circles and put the whole thing together. Then the fun began.
We experiments with the length of rope, how fast to pull and release, pre-spinning for longer and more. The goal was to keep our spinners spinning and if you could make a zzoomm sound, you were really an expert!
How’d it go? We had a nice sized group today. Not too many kids but a fair amount. Everyone was successfully able to create spinners, even if some struggled with getting started. Overall, this was a successful and fairly easy program. A good one to keep in the back pocket.
That’s all for now!
-M-