Activities for Kids: Small solutions for BIG problems

I’m posting my latest activity for all us of kids big and small stuck at home. So far, I’ve posted an activity to build a shrink ray and peg figures, along with the handouts to map a miniature person’s trek across a room in the house. It’s my attempt to make us perceive our current confined settings as bigger than they actually are!

Continuing the theme, I’m introducing another angle to this set of activities.

Creature Attack!

Whenever I’ve asked my students to map out an epic journey across a single room in the house, I then surprise them by springing a new challenge upon their characters: an attack by a deadly creature!

Well, it’s not SO deadly if you are normal sized, but for miniature characters, beetles, centipedes, and frogs are quite perilous!

What you will need:

• Paper and writing supplies
• Plastic critters (available at any dollar store, or also in your nearby toybox!)—spiders, snakes, beetles, grasshoppers, frogs, cockroaches—you name it!
• Small “tools”:
  • Buttons
  • Bottle caps
  • Coins
  • Drink umbrellas
  • Birthday candles
  • Plastic spoons
  • Popsicle sticks
  • Spools of thread
  • Toothpicks
  • Crayons
  • Clothespins
  • Elastic bands
  • Paperclips
  • In other words, anything you have lying around the home that a miniature character could “repurpose”

I like to begin this activity by putting all the critters in “Bag #1” then having the students picking one out “blindly.” This introduces an extra element of fun and surprise.

Then, I put all the “tools” into Bag #2 and ask the students to pick out two or three of them.

Now, we’ve got the problem (the critter) and the solution (the tool), and we just have to figure out how the character can use the tools to escape and survive. This is fun problem-solving!

If you’ve been following along with these activities and already mapped out the setting, then this confrontation with the critter can take place in that epic landscape (like in the middle of a shag-rug forest)!

At the very bottom, I’ve posted a handout so that kids can brainstorm some solutions. And here are some photos from some of the past classes where I’ve rolled out this project.

And here is the Big Problem — Small Solution handout:

If you have writers in your family, this set of activities provides a lot of inspiration! But I have one other creative output that you can do with this set of projects, which I will post in the coming days. Stay safe, stay well, and stay tuned . . .