Whole Child: Ramp Exploration!

Our Whole Child kiddos love to build! It's an interest we've seen growing in our kids for many weeks, and so we decided to challenge them with a new building and engineering activity.

Some of our students previously made ramps out of our wooden boards in the front yard, but we wanted to provide different tools to see how they might build new kinds of ramps. Recently we took some donated building supplies on our nature walks and discovered that we could make them into extra long ramps and roll plastic balls as well as corks and spools down them.

We had to work together to figure out how the ramps could be placed next to each other so they didn’t get stuck on tree roots, leaves or small holes in the ground, but eventually we figured out how to get them to roll all the way down three ramps and even further into the grass!

When we got back to our studio after our walk, our Wednesday students wanted to keep building! They took the opportunity to explore our studio materials to see what else they could use to build ramps and how we could use our existing ramps inside. They discovered we could build them against our tables, on our bean bags, add tubes for tunnels and that they could even use sculpting clay to help “glue” the ramps to the floor and the table so they wouldn’t slide off.