STEAM Activity:
Cardboard Treehouse
Gather sheets of cardboard, paper towel tubes, tape, glue, string, and any other recyclable materials you may have accessible. Challenge your child to build a layered treehouse or fairy garden house for their small toys. Cut the cardboard sheets into fun shapes to form the flooring of this fun, multi-level structure. Use slices of paper towel tubes to form the structural supports. Your child might add in staircases, ladders, ramps, and swings onto her different floors. Bring in other natural materials, such as branches, twigs and rocks to add features throughout. Their imagination is limitless!
https://minimadthings.com/blogs/news/recycled-cardboard-treehouse
Science Activity:
Gummy Bear Exploration
This activity involves a special, sugary treat for the sake of science! Gather 2 bowls, water, salt and gummy bears. Challenge your children to predict what will happen when gummy bears are placed in regular water versus a bowl of saturated saltwater. To make the solution, add salt to a bowl of boiling water, stirring constantly until no more salt dissolves. Cool the solution in the fridge. When the solution is cold, label each bowl, deposit your gummy bears and place in the fridge. It turns out that gummy bears act as a sponge in regular water through a process called osmosis. Osmosis does not work in saltwater!
https://www.playdoughtoplato.com/growing-gummy-bear-science/
Physical Activity
Card Moves
All you need for this activity is a deck of cards! Ask your child to pair a specific exercise with each card suit. For instance, hearts could be paired with ‘hops’, spades could be paired with ‘squats’, clubs could be paired with ‘crunches’, and diamonds could be paired with ‘donkey kicks.’ Remove jokers and divide the cards evenly among the players. Each player flips over a card, and the player with the highest card takes all played cards. All players with the lowest card must complete the exercise paired with the suit, with the number of reps set by the value of the highest card played. The goal is to be the first player to collect all 52 cards!
https://handsonaswegrow.com/indoor-energy-buster-card-game-kids/
Creative Activity:
Candle Painting
Use an old candle from your home and draw a picture on a piece of blank paper. Water down some paint and paint over to reveal your special candle resist patterns. If there are no candles available, you can dig out your crayons to make some crayon resist designs as well!
Additional Resources:
www.arcademics.com Find fun and free educational games for children in grades K-8. Featuring a wide variety of math, language arts, typing and geography games.
https://www.getepic.com/ Get 30 days of free access to 40,000 digital books for children ages 3-12.
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