Stuffed Animal Bumper Cars

One of my goals for the rest of this school year is to do more fun projects with my kids.  Participating in the Virtual Book Club for Kids is a great way to motivate myself. This month the club featured books by Laura Numeroff. We read, "If you Give a Pig a Party."

My children were curious about the bumper cars, since they have never ridden any. I don't expect that we'll have the opportunity to enjoy bumper cars any time soon, so we made some bumper cars, for their stuffed animals.

I told them each to pick 3 animals, then design a car for them.  They had a great time searching through the project materials saved from our clean trash to design their cars.  

When each of the stuffed annals had a car, I demonstrated how bumper cars ram into one another. 

I think this activity connects nicely to the Next Generation Science Standard:

K-PS2-2.	Analyze data to determine if a design solution works as intended to change the speed or direction of an object with a push or a pull.*

I tried to ask some questions about different sizes of cars impacting each other differently and collisions with different speeds. They tried out a few different kinds of collisions,  but were not interested in pausing the fun to reflect.  Maybe next time, they made me promise to save the cars for another day.

Click here to check out more great activities to go with Laura Numeroff's books.