Playful Weekends #2: Toothpick Creations!
There was a time when every restaurant, airline meal, 90s home dining table would have toothpicks on the side.
As a child, these toothpicks were obviously never used for picking stuff out of your teeth. They took on so many different roles in my imagination. Pirate swords, pillars, arrows and javelins - so many magical things a toothpick could be!
If you have a bunch of toothpicks lying around, here are 5 incredible projects you can do with your child this weekend!
Patterns (Ages 4+):
Use your toothpick box to look for interesting patterns or lay them out to create organized and random patterns! This is a great way to get your child interested in geometry from an earlier age!
Marshmallow People (Ages 4+):
Use marshmallow or dough to create some snowpeople like creations! Experiment with postures, colors, materials, etc.
You can further use your imagination and make an entire scene/play/stop motion animation!
Imagine if they were toothpicks! :D
Atoms and Molecules (Ages 8+)
For those with a scientific bent of mind, you can use toothpicks and dough/marshmallows and make entire molecules! Use different colors for different atoms and the toothpicks as chemical bonds!
You could also ask kids to try and invent their own molecules and give them cool names!
Start simple, but push kids to go more complex!
Structures and Pillars (Ages 8+)
For the architects and civil engineers in the making, you can tempt kids to build complex structures from buildings and bridges to skyscrapers and aeroplanes!
Push them to think about what structures are more stable, which are less stable and what makes them so!
https://www.scienceprojectideas.org/toothpick-bridge.htm
Mega cities (Ages 10+)
If you have a kid who’s gone through 1-4 but loves real complexity, this could be a great opportunity to expand your child’s thinking and move them onto more complex structures.
Use different structures, buildings, different materials to craft entire neighborhoods!
Try all these wonderful toothpick creations out and let me know what you come up with!
Interesting Insights
Many of us assume that the debates of technology and screen time in children’s lives is new. We also think that spotting issues in online teaching as just a packaging of old ideas in a new box is a new/unique form of thinking. It’s new in the overall scheme of the grand old universe, but quite old in the scheme of modern lives.
Nuanced thoughts have been around since at least the 1960s. In particular here’s an excerpt from ‘Teaching Children Thinking’ by Seymour Papert at MIT.
Here’s the link to the full paper - https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/5835/AIM-247.pdf
Have a playful weekend!
Prasanth Nori