STEM Activities – Tied 2 Teaching Review

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STEM activities are a great way to introduce Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics to your child in a way that is fun and hands on.

I recently had to the opportunity to review STEM Activities, Full Year of Challenges with Close Reading by Tied 2 Teaching.

This bundle of STEM activities contains more than 65 projects for your children to enjoy.

Each project comes with a close reading related to the theme as well as questions about the reading.  Combining reading and reading comprehension with the STEM activities is a nice addition.  When you find STEM activities on Pinterest, you rarely find accompanying readings or information to add to the learning process.  We use the readings as a read-aloud time, as younger brothers who are not yet reading really enjoyed these projects as well.  The close readings really make these STEM activities stand above any others we have tried.

The Tied 2 Teaching STEM activities are divided by months.  There are activities corresponding to holidays or important days that occur during that month.  This allows you to do a project a week and have a whole year’s worth of projects.

But if your children are anything like mine, they will binge on projects and complete 5 in a day!

Leprechaun Trap

The first STEM project we did as a family was a leprechaun trap.

The close reading, called “Are Leprechauns Real?”, explores the history of leprechauns.  After the reading, there are questions for the children to answer about the passage.  This brought up some interesting conversation about leprechauns and other mythical creatures in our home.

The boys decided they wanted to try out two different kinds of traps.  One trap used a box and was based on a trap they learned about when researching survival skills.  The second trap was inspired by one of the pictures in the project’s PDF that they found intriguing.

The Jelly Bean Tower

The next of the STEM activities that we tried was the Jelly Bean Tower.

This project required the children to each use 100 jelly beans and 100 toothpicks.  The goal is to create the tallest tower possible.  The reading for this project is about how jelly beans are made.

This project barely got off the ground.

We loved the concept but had to make some tweaks.  When shopping for jelly beans, an item I do not buy often at all, I realized how expensive they were.  The bag of jelly beans I bought was almost $14 CAD and contained around 100 jelly beans.  Originally I had planned to let the children compete against each other to build the tallest tower but quickly changed that to let them work together to make the tower as I was not going to spend $45 on jelly beans!

The next issue with this project, for us, was that the jelly beans had a very firm shell (the proper term for the outside of a jelly bean as learned in the reading).  I do not know if it was the brand of jelly beans or if they were stale, but it was very difficult to stick the toothpicks into the jelly beans.  A few ouchies later and only about 13 inches into the air, we gave up.

Our issues with this project should not prevent you from trying this project.  We will definitely try it again.  The boys were brainstorming about different candies they could try to create a sturdy structure without hurting their fingers.

Design A Bug

When I first downloaded the  STEM Activities, Full Year of Challenges with Close Reading bundle, my 8-year-old and I looked through all the different projects.

My 8-year-old loves all things insects, reptiles, and all animals in general.  When he saw the Design A Bug challenge, he was instantly intrigued.  We didn’t even finish looking through all of the different STEM activities and he was already off to the lego bin to create his bug.

One of the questions to go along with this activity is “What do you already know about bugs?”.  His answer evolved into an hour long (perhaps longer) discussion about bugs.

Alien Spacecraft

If you have been following our family for a while, you may know that my eldest son absolutely loves anything to do with space.  When I asked him to pick one of the STEM activities, he picked space-related one: Alien Spacecraft.

The reading for this project was all about UFOs and the challenge was to create your own UFO.  To make this more difficult, you were asked to design a spacecraft that could be dropped from 3 different heights without your aliens (sour patch kids) falling out.

Check out our Unschooling Life video about STEM Activities to see how they performed!

Other STEM Activities

There are so many different STEM activities in this pack.

We have been able to do more activities than what I have described above, but if I told you about every one we would be here for days!  These STEM activities are so fun and we are thoroughly enjoying them.

We have not been able to try them all out but we looked through a bunch and I thought I would share with you the ones that we plan on doing next.

• Toilet Paper Dispenser
• Design A UFO (Lego)
• Design A Superhero
• Rainbow Bridge
• Log Cabin

Final Thoughts

I am so glad that I was able to participate in this review for the STEM Activities, Full Year of Challenges with Close Reading from Tied 2 Teaching.  If you are interested in adding more Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) into your home, you should definitely check this bundle out!

If you want to see what other Crew members have shared about these STEM activities, click this banner to read more reviews!