Children are natural explorers, constantly asking questions and discovering how things work. STREAM learning encourages curiosity, problem-solving, and creativity through hands-on experiences that build skills in science, technology, reading, engineering, art, and math.
If you’re looking for engaging ways to keep your children busy while supporting discovery and engineering thinking, our STREAM Activity Guide is a great place to start. Explore fun, simple activities that inspire curiosity, innovation, and learning through play.
By providing materials, experiences, and opportunities for your child they will question, hypothesize, experiment and conclude!
- Block Challenge – Challenge your child to fill a square with blocks. How many can you fit in the shape made out of painter’s tape? How tall can you make your structure? Providing open ended questions to an activity develops your child’s cognitive thinking skills!
- Melting Ice Experiment – Create a variety of large ice blocks for your child to explore. Place in a shallow sensory bin and add several squeeze bottles filled with warm water, food colouring and salt shakers. Encourage your child to add salt and warm water to the blocks to discover the reactions.
- Button Challenge – Encourage your little architect with a button challenge! Provide your child with a variety of buttons and playdough to create structures using the dough as the ‘glue’ or ‘mortar’. How high can you make your structure?
- Shaving Cream Towers – Your child will love to create towers and buildings with foam blocks and shaving cream. The white fluff can be used as glue in your child’s ‘buildings’ and creations. Place the blocks and cream in a shallow dish for your child to discover the sticky fun!
- Mess Free Rainbow Bag – Exploring colours by mixing paint allows your child to discover new hues in the rainbow. Add a variety of colours in a large zip lock bag for your child to squeeze, squish and explore.
- Tinfoil Boats – Encourage your child to form a boat with a square of tin foil that will float in a shallow bin of water. Add stones, pebbles or gems to the ‘boat’ and test how many you can place inside. Your child will enjoy testing the strength of their boat as they play and learn.
- Milk into Plastic – Take 1 cup of milk and heat it in the microwave for one and a half minutes, add 4 tablespoons of vinegar and stir. The mixture will begin to clump as the vinegar breaks down the protein. Strain the milk through a strainer leaving the clumps behind. Finally squeeze out the liquid on a paper towel. Add colour and press into shapes.
- Build Zoo Challenge – Can you build a zoo? Provide your child with a variety of items for them to build a home in which the animals can find shelter. Playdough, straws, sticks, popsicle sticks etc. provide wonderful building opportunities.
