Oddly enough, this one came to me in a dream, not sure why haha. But one of my favorite ways to share at the end of Lego Club is for kids to interact with each others' builds, like when we've done our Lego Pinball challenge or our Lego Mini-Golf challenge or our Lego Ice Slide... Continue Reading →
This one was the biggest hit I've had in awhile. It seems like the best things in STEM have already been done and it's always hard to find new ideas. Over the years I've based a lot of my challenges off of classic STEM experiments, like my Lego Parachute challenge is based off an egg... Continue Reading →
Being in Wisconsin, I feel obliged to do a Farm storytime. As I mentioned in my other post Storytime–Stories about Farms, using animal sounds is a great way to work on phonic awareness. I stand by that storytime, but the activity I prepped (which you can see in the original post) was a little too... Continue Reading →
This is one I thought of years ago, but never went ahead with, but finally got around to this year. I've seen some STEM challenges about building a structure that can survive a "hurricane" but that's hard to translate that to Legos, so I made it basically into an egg drop challenge, except we're not... Continue Reading →
I came up with this one from just observing kids during a free build. There was one kiddo that filled up his whole Lego plate with Legos and I thought that would be a great challenge. There are some kids that just naturally want to do this, so it's easy for younger kiddos. But there... Continue Reading →
I talked about this more in depth last year, but a making a movie every year to help promote summer reading has really elevated my school visit presence but also takes a lot of the pressure off. If you're looking for how to make a movie, you can go to last year's post here where... Continue Reading →
Getting ready for Summer Reading at my library. We usually incorporate the CSLP theme in some way--this year it's "Color Our World." Scavenger hunts are always a big hit, I did a city-wide one during the "Universe of Stories" theme that I called The Amazing Space Race. And I did an outdoor nature scavenger hunt... Continue Reading →
My friend and I auditioned for "Lego Masters" back in the day, and one of the things that they wanted to see was as many builds as possible. So one night we got together to build, and decided to build something simple, like a farm. But that quickly got boring, so we made what a... Continue Reading →
I modeled this program a little bit after my Kids Voting program I've been doing for forever. I've never been the biggest fan of Battle of the Books or things like that. There's definitely merits to programs like that, but there's some drawbacks too. Since you can really only participate if you know the book... Continue Reading →
I don't necessarily like doing crafts, so when I do them, I try to make them fun, engaging, and something you wouldn't normally do, all while trying to make them recyclable. So I found this simple pop-up design, drew a shark, and added a pun--perfect valentine's day card. It's pretty simple--since it's a pop up,... Continue Reading →
