STEAM to the Max Activities

Did you know all you need to make a functional stethoscope is two paper cups and a paper towel tube? When the cups are taped to the ends of the tube, kids can put one cup to their ear and another to their friend's or grownup's chest and hear their heartbeat. During this program we talk about how heart rate speeds differ between adults and kids and how the funnel shape of the cups helps guide the sound waves to our ear make the heart beat easier to hear.

For this activity, kids get to scribble on coffee filters, spray them with water to watch the ink spread through the coffee filter, then fold their coffee filters up and secure with a pipe cleaner stem. While it's mostly just a fun art project, this activity involves capillary action, the mechanism through which water spreads through absorbent materials and gets pulled up into flower stems against the force of gravity.

This activity walks kids through a series of steps to extract real DNA from strawberries. We talk about what cells and DNA are, how each step works to help us get closer to getting the DNA separated from the rest of the material in the strawberry cells, and how to use beakers to measure out our liquid ingredients.

This activity is a simple but fun way to get in touch with nature when the weather is nice. Using the museum's Discovery Garden space, the kids are encouraged to spend time outdoors finding objects that are a variety of colors, textures, and shapes before gluing them to a sheet of poster board to make a sensory board that allows them to re-explore later. We also talk about how sensory toys and time spent appreciating nature are good for emotional health and regulation.

I love how this activity is so simple yet also a great way to learn about some more complex ideas that often aren't talked about until kids are older. This project involves decorating a cutting out the shape of an animal from black card stock before dropping it into water that has a thin layer of clear nail polish on the surface to make it iridescent. We discuss how our eyes process light into colors and shapes, what iridescence is, and what places we see iridescence in our lives both man-made and in the natural world. 

This project may seem like just a simple art project on the surface but it's so much more! Not only do kids get a cool little handmade decoration to hang up at home, but having to keep track of when to go under and when to go over helps them build pattern recognition skills that will contribute to a solid foundation to build logical thinking, memory, and mathematical thinking skills upon. Navigating the strings while on the loom and the tension of the ribbon is also a great way to practice some fine motor skills.

For this activity the kids tape popsicle sticks together side by side and then draw an image on them which makes a simple puzzle when they're later un-taped and mixed up. The more popsicle sticks the harder the puzzle. This also gives them a chance to practice problem solving, memory, and pattern recognition skills.

I created this activity as a special, seasonal activity for Pi Day. Most of the children who attend STEAM to the Max are a bit young to understand the concept of Pi in its entirety, but having a day all about circles provides a great opportunity to start the conversation about how Pi represents the relationship between the diameter and circumference of a circle, is a number that goes on infinitely without repeating itself, and will be really important in geometry when they get a little older.

Popsicle stick catapults are hands down one of my favorite activities to do! Kids build their own catapults with popsicle sticks, a plastic spoon, and some rubber bands. We discuss how the placement of the stack of popsicle sticks in the middle in relation to the spoon impacts how well the catapults shoot and what their trajectory will be when they're used. Then the kids are given a selection of cotton balls, pom poms, and small wooden blocks for ammunition to compare to one another.