Cold and wet and dismal outside? There’s nothing like staying inside, doing some math enrichment with the kids! Newspaper, rolled tightly and taped, makes an excellent, large-format building toy. It’s also great for three more reasons: Here’s how to turn yesterday’s newspaper into a temporary toy that your kids will love using to increase their spatial reasoning abilities. To make your toy, place two full sheets of newspaper on top of each other, roll them very tightly from one corner to the opposite corner, and secure with a small piece of masking tape. That’s it! To make the best tight roll, use something to start you off. I’m using a thin marker and then pulling it out of the tube each time, but if you have something like paper straws, which can go into the recycling, too, then you wouldn’t have to remove them from the finished tubes, and your newspaper tubes would be all the tighter and sturdier for them. My kiddos “helped” with the creation of the newspaper tubes, but neither of them had the ability to roll the newspaper tightly enough, so as soon as we had a half-dozen or so tubes done, I encouraged them to start building, and then assigned myself to the job of making newspaper tubes as fast as they could use them. Next » To build with the rolled newspaper tubes, just start connecting them with masking tape or staples. Each tube can be easily cut with scissors, and easily bent or folded. Some structures, such as pyramids, are easy and sturdy, but your kiddos can up the challenge by trying out more complicated multi-sided structures. My six-year-old and eight-year-old were busy for half the morning constructing a cube-shaped playhouse for themselves, and it was fascinating to watch their engineering skills evolve as they problem-solved in the real world. They invented various kinds of supportive struts, but the real breakthrough came when my eight-year-old realized that two tubes taped together provided enough width in any given beam to completely solve the problem of the structure torquing at its joints. And they didn’t even realize that they were performing applied mathematics!
