pencils Archives - JDaniel4s Mom

Putting the Rain Stick Together

In many ways making a rain stick is a STEM activity. Your children will not just dump all the supplies into a plastic container and be done. They will have to experiment with the number of pencils and fasteners to place in the container. They will have to think about how to arrange the materials in the container.

Why?

If you place too many fasteners and pencils in the container, they will not be able to move.

If you place to few fasteners in the container, there many not be as big a sound.

What about the pencils?

Children will also want to experiment with how to have to pencils placed in the container. The pencils can be eraser side down or eraser side up. Children can arrange the pencils so the ends are along the edge at the bottom of the container. There are a number of ways that they can be arranged in the container. Your children may find it depends on the size of container you supply for them.

Exploring the Rain Stick

How to Make a School Supply Rain Stick Supplies

Once your children have created their rain sticks, they can explore different ways to shake them. Below you will find several ways we found to shake a rain stick.

Rain Stick Actions

Move it up and down

Shake it side to side horizontally

Turn it in a circle

Shake it side to side while holding it verticall

If you like this rain stick activity, you will love other science activities I have pinned to my Early Learning Science board.

These STEM activities for kids featuring #2 pencils post is the second in a series of four posts featuring science explorations with school supplies. The first post in the series focused on using school supplies to make ramps for cars. Your children are going to love building and creating with pencils.

My son’s school supply list requested five boxes of #2 pencils. Just prior to taking them to school for Meet the Teacher we had a lot of pencils to build with. If you are able to pick up pencils during Back to School sales, you will have tons of pencils to build with too.

STEM Activities for Kids

Building a Simple Tower

Your children will find building pencils towers both fun and easy. The fact that pencils have so many sides made them easy to build with. We built towers with 4 packages of 20 pencils. The goal was to build super straight towers.

We started with a base of two pencils that were parallel to each other Then we added a level that went in the opposite direction.

We continued the process until we ran out of pencils. If you have more pencils that we did, you can build a very tall tower.

Other STEM Activities with Towers

You can challenge your children to make towers in a variety of styles. Below is a list of tower styles I think your children will love making:

You can make a tower that gets narrower at the top.
You can build a wide a porch on left side of the bottom level. Then create a small tower on right side of the bottom level.
You can build a tower with a triangular or pentagon shaped base.
You can build a tower with all the pencil erasers facing inside.

STEM Activities with Shapes

You can challenge your children to create the outlines for variety shapes with pencils. They can be given shapes to build orally or written out on index cards.
We were able to make a bunch of shapes with our pencils. You will find them in a list below. I bet your children will come up with more shapes than we did.