Self Quarantine Day 29: Chain Reaction

I’m an advocate for learning through play but sometimes it’s hard for me to slow down and get involved in the kids’ play. I get caught up in everything else that needs to be done and I can be a bit of a stick in the mud. Today I decided to have some fun with the kids.

I was inspired by an awesome video from my friends at Knock Knock Children’s Museum. Since the quarantine started they’ve been releasing daily videos about various topics. Some of it has to do with making and tinkering, some videos are story time, others are arts and crafts or even physical activities. Today’s video was about chain reactions. You can check it out here.

I’ve always found chain reactions and Rube Goldberg machines to be exciting and fun so this felt like the right one for us. I showed the kids the video. They loved it and wanted to see more. So we went on YouTube and watched some other really awesome chain reaction videos. The look on their faces when I told them that we could make one erased all of the annoying things they’d done during the day. They were excited about science and excited to play with me.

We cleared off the table first. Then, I had them each gather five items that they thought we could use. We ended up with way more items and many things that we tried and scrapped. We must have spent close to an hour working on our chain reaction. Our end result wasn’t overly impressive but you can tell by our celebration that we were super proud of it.

It was 100% worth every minute of time we spent on it. It was fun to watch them problem solve together.It felt good to slow down and pay special attention to them without having to enforce a ton of rules. They suggested new things to try and I got to say yes every time. One more gift from this stupid virus. It’s a shitty situation but today at least some good came from it.