This month, the students at many of our sites decorated delicious gingerbread houses. We’re taking inspiration from this classic holiday activity for our this month’s STEAM Challenge.
As always, we love a good book to put us in the STEAM spirit! Our December recommendation is The Plan For The Gingerbread House, by Darcy Pattison. This story is about a team of children who try to build the perfect gingerbread house for a contest, but face and overcome engineering challenges like burnt cookies, thin icing, and a collapsing structure. They learn perseverance and to learn from their mistakes, and despite initial failures, they successfully build a prize-winning house by revising their plan.
After reading, it’s time to put on your engineering caps and gather your supplies. All you’ll need for this simple project is pipe cleaners and straws. Your challenge is to work together (or have a friendly family competition) to build a house using only these two materials.
Insert pieces of pipe cleaners into the ends of straws, bending the pipe cleaners to form “corners” and attaching more straws to form walls, rooftops, windows and doors of a house. Special tip: you can fit up to 3 pipe cleaner pieces into a straw!! For added fun, you can cut, color and tape on paper to form the outside of the house – making it look like a gingerbread house!
Click here for straw house inspiration from Frugal Fun 4 Boys and Girls!
As always, be as creative as you want, and have lots of fun learning together!