Activities & Days Out / 25 October, 2020 / Nanny Anita

Building Glow Stick City

Sometimes the most enjoyable activities are the simplest ones; those that don’t require any steps to follow, but instead allow you to create with no restrictions. Now, if you throw glow sticks into the mix you can bet you will have a winner. Building a glow stick city was just that sort of activity.  I thought that this activity may keep EC and YC busy for about 30 minutes. Nope, we were doing this activity for almost 2 hours. I had to prise them away for dinner with the promise that I wouldn’t destroy their masterpieces. Well, at least until the glow stick had died.

Make sure you follow my STEM board on Pinterest for more ideas, and don’t forget to pin the picture at the bottom

You will need:

• Junk modelling i.e. boxes, loo rolls, kitchen rolls
• Glow sticks
• Scissors

Before we started we closed all the curtains and doors in the room that we were doing the activity in. We kept the lights on for the first part while we were using the scissors, but after that we turned everything off and had the glow sticks provide the light.

The task that I sat them was to build a city using just the glow sticks and the junk modelling provided. They couldn’t use anything to stick things together with.

Both EC and YC dived straight into their constructions. EC built something that kind of resembled an ATAT from Star Wars.

Whereas YC’s building resembled a sky scrapper version of ker-plunk. I was, in fact, wrong. YC had built a farm.

YC’s farm

Once they had finished glow stick city v.1 I showed them some pictures of famous city skylines at night, like Hong Kong, Tokyo and NYC.

After see the pictures EC went on to redesign his so it resembled a disco ball. He said that he was inspired by one of the buildings he had seen in the Hong Kong picture.

The only issue we had with this project was sharing out the glow sticks. I did it half and half, but of course one of them had more of one colour than the other!

My take on the Sydney Harbour Bridge

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