When I came up with this one, I wanted to do something tie into the the Summer Reading theme of “Universe of Stories.” But I didn’t want to do just rockets or spaceships. Instead I got inspiration from the egg drop challenges I did in grade school.
So after we went over rules, I told my kiddos that they would have to build two things: a landing pad and some sort of space vehicle. At the end of the hour, we would go to the second floor and launch or vehicles onto our landing pads WITHOUT them breaking!!
To help with this, every kid got one parachute, that I made out of strong garbage bags and yarn. Ideally they would have gotten to design their own parachute and experimented that way, but I prepped this ahead of time for the sake of time. BUT they did have to find a way to attach their chute to their design. We also quickly talked about ways to try and get their vehicles to drop straight down onto their landing pads by making sure weight was distributed. And we also discussed how we could build to make sure our Legos didn’t explode on impact by reinforcing our designs and making sure small parts like wings were secure.
At the end we launched our vehicles of the 2nd floor for about 10 minutes or so. The first time or so was really constructive and we tried to talk about why certain things happened or didn’t happen. After that kids, just wanted to keep throwing their design of the balcony until there was nothing left, and that’s fine!! Right at the end, we spent a few minutes rebuilding our vehicles as best we could so there would still be something to display.
Lots of fun!!
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The Lego Librarian 
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