CATERPILLAR MAZE

My sister-in-law took one look at this and asked if we were making caterpillars 🐛 . While the reality couldn’t be further from the truth, I could see why she thought so and recommend this activity as part of a STEM station during a butterfly 🦋 unit (or anytime, really).

To start, I had B help me set this up. She selected the placement of the toilet paper rolls (great opportunity to introduce vocabulary such as “horizontal,” “vertical,” and “diagonal”), and she chose the color of painter’s tape used for each (great for color naming and identification)…and then we walked away. Yes, you read that right; I explained nothing to her.

I was curious to see how she would play with it, but she didn’t. After some time, I brought over a larger empty bucket and a tiny one with pom poms. When I took one pom pom and put it through the top of one of the toilet paper rolls and she watched it travel, she almost lost her mind. 😮

The next thing I knew, she was trying objects of different sizes and weights, including her Peppa toys. This caused some of the tape to come undone, which in my mind helped give her an opportunity to fix it (trial and error is a beautiful lesson). Our favorite part? When an object traveled through multiple tubes and finally landed in a bucket. Yes! 🙌🏻

Looking for ways to #adaptmyplay ?

⭕️ Add paper letters affixed with tape to the pom poms and have the children spell out words with them.

⭕️ Have them sort the pom poms by color or size (S, M, L).

⭕️ Have them count how many pom poms made it into the bucket, how many got stuck inside the “maze,” and how many fell on the floor…then graph it.

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