We’re still in the middle of our standardized testing, so there isn’t much time left outside of that to incorporate math
lessons. So when a few minutes popped up
today, I grabbed them! A couple days ago, working in teams,
we assembled these cool little catapults (directions for assembling them are below).
Today I brought them out and we had a little launching competition. What better way to grab the
attention of a antsy-pants test taker than to tell them that we’re going to shoot things across
the room! I had the kids gather things up that
they wanted to launch, then each team
got some time to practice using their catapult before the big event... I had each team choose 5 items to compete
with. We shot them off, looking for the
longest shot. It was fun to see the kids
weighing their options, thinking about their practices and comparing with each
other before deciding what to pick.
After each round, the kids used their rulers to measure the distance of their shots. For the last round, we shook things up a bit and used tape measures - they LOVED having the flexible plastic measuring tapes and they loved the ease of figuring out the measurement.
Building a Catapult
(this should only shoot things 3-6 feet)
Materials
9 thick popsicle sticks
7-8 rubber bands
1 water bottle cap
Items to launch - we used cap erasers, pom pons, plastic coins, etc.
- Stack 7 popsicle sticks together. Wrap the ends in a couple rubber bands to hold the stack together.
- Stack 2 popsicle sticks together. Wrap one end in a couple rubber bands to hold them together. Open the other end and insert the large stack in the middle. Then using another rubber band, wrap the large bundle to the small – we criss crossed it in the middle to really hold it down.
- Finally hot glue the water bottle cap to the end of the catapult. I did this to a bunch of popsicle sticks years ago and we just keep reusing these parts each year.
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