Rainbow Marshmallow and Toothpick Structures

Create some beautiful rainbow marshmallow and toothpick structures in this gorgeous, mathematical invitation to play for kids! Great for problem solving and developing maths and construction skills, this is a great boredom-busting activity that’s sure to appeal to all ages.

This is the next in our series of fabulous guest posts from talented blog friends around the world. Thank you Suja!

Hello friends at The Imagination Tree!

I’m stoked to be posting for Anna. I don’t have to tell you how awesome she is or else you won’t be here. Right? Her giant archive of invitations to play alone has helped me through some of my kids’ hard younger toddler years. While Anna is soaking in her brand new baby boy, today’s post is presented to you by me. I’m Suja and I blog over at Kids Play Box where we share many art projects, crafts and sensory play ideas.

I enjoy creating play and art recipes with my kids. Since I love a good color explosion I try to make the projects into a rainbow theme. Today we are creating and building with rainbow marshmallows. At Kids Play Box we recently shared a couple of fun and quirky art projects- painting jumbo marshmallows and coloring mini marshmallows. We rainbow colored and painted those marshmallows and they were pretty much begging us to be used in a fun building activity.

Materials

Jumbo Marshmallows {painted}
Mini Marshmallows { colored}
Toothpicks

Invitation

I laid out our dried and dusted rainbow marshmallows along with toothpicks on a couple of clear trays.

I later invited the children and simply mentioned that they can build structures with the materials in front of them.

The kids { 6 & 4 } love building. Well the 6 y.o loves building and 4 y.o is trying to keep up.

Mini marshmallows were of course easier to build with tooth picks. Jumbo marshmallow structures with toothpicks were also possible. However skewers would be a better option if you are looking for sturdier and more complex structures while using the big ones.

My 6 year went right ahead and started constructing. This entire activity was great for her developing fine motor skills. She needed a lot of patience and careful finger movements to hold onto a mini marshmallow and connect 2 marshmallows with a tooth pick.

It was a great lesson in structural balance. Some structures felt flat, mostly because of the base. She had to go back and fix the same structure and make it more stable. She tried to start building again from scratch but fixing the unstable one was a challenge and I wanted her to try that route before starting from scratch again.

We tried very simple structures first starting off with a square.

Slowly we moved away from squares and towards tetrahedron-like structures.

This activity gave us an opportunity to talk about sides and vertices.

She also scanned all the structures she made and looked for dangling marshmallows and reinforced them with more toothpicks. At 6, the idea for her is to simply build any stable structure.