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Egg Carton Building Blocks
Stem
3-4 years old
DISCOVER
A simple activity to sharpen children’s ability to design, build and construct to achieve a planned effect. By using an open-ended material such as Egg Carton cut into various sizes, Little Discoverers have the opportunity to exercise their spatial awareness, logical thinking, reasoning and problem-solving capabilities!
PLAY
Materials you need:
- Egg carton trays cut into various sizes ‘blocks. eg: cut egg cartons into half, thirds or individual egg cups
- Paint (optional) - to create different coloured blocks.
Set it up:
- Lay out the egg carton blocks, grouping blocks of the same size together.
- Prepare a sign that says, "What can you build?"
- Print out the building block template.
Steps to guide Little Discoverers:
- Introduce the activity and demonstrate that egg cartons can be put together to create different shapes and height
- Encourage children to build the tallest tower possible using all the egg carton blocks of various sizes in front of them.
- Identify and name common shapes together.
- Build according to the building block template alongside them while asking appropriate questions to guide them into problem solving.
- What do you need to create that? (problem-solving)
- How can we make sure it doesn’t fall? (logical thinking)
- Can you name all the shapes you see? (numeracy)
- How many egg carton blocks did you use? (numeracy)
LEARN
This activity is great for building early childhood numeracy skills. As they make arrangements with object that fits together differently while talking about shapes build capabilities for future application of mathematical concepts. Helpful vocabularies for this activity include up, high, bigger, smaller, triangle, rectangle.
While it’s tempting to ensure children to follow through every step of the activity, we all know they have a mind of their own, here are some ways to adapt the activity:
For beginners, prepare a simpler building templates to follow and build
For advanced learners, sketch out the design of your building together before constructing using the egg cartons
Keep the exploration going by including new materials for children to construct their buildings together with the egg carton blocks. Example: Jumbo popsicle sticks
WHAT DID WE ACHIEVE?
Besides sharpening numeracy skills such as shape identification and counting. By allowing children to choose their own materials to test what works best to achieve the final product, children are exercising their thinking muscles which builds them into better logical thinkers and problem solvers!
