What you need:
- Cardboard box
- Tape
- Paper, tissue paper, recycled items
Directions:
- Wrap the tape around the box with the sticky side facing outward.
- Use the recycled materials to decorate the box by sticking them onto the tape.
- Display your masterpiece!
Ways to Expand the Activity:
- Create a character! Add eyes, arms, tails, wings, etc to create a new friend.
- Use different sized boxes to make a unique shaped display! Wrap the boxes individually or together and decorate in a whole new way!
What Kids Learn:
- Basic engineering skills. Engineers solve problems with constraints. They learn to solve problems by using the engineering design process: asking questions, coming up with solutions, building, testing and improving.
- Spatial or visual thinking. Being able to imagine the positions of objects and how they interact is an important skill for learning math.
- Fine motor skills. Kids practice using the small muscles in their hands later used for writing.
- Symbolic thinking, or the ability to think about one thing representing something else. When small children begin to connect a house on paper to the house they live in, they start building the connections in the brain that allow for reading and learning later.