Demolition Observation

I figured since we are abandoning all crafts for awhile, we might as well go big with our manliness. I found an idea on a website a friend sent me called, No Time For Flashcards. "Wrecking Ball Science" looked like it was just what we needed to bring up our levels of testosterone.

If you click on the link, you'll see that the author of this activity posted some awesome pictures of how "wrecking ball science" worked out for them. My picture is much less exciting, but here it is in all it's glory:

Honestly, I think this idea is pretty genius, especially for boys. It is probably one of the most successful activities we've done in terms of short- and long-term interest. The boys were SO excited about every aspect of playing around with a wrecking ball.  The first thing we had to do was find all the blocks in our house and construct a big city next to an empty doorway in our house. The doorway that goes into our kitchen is a pretty good one, so that's where we set up camp. After we had a decent sized city, we spent some time talking about construction. I asked them questions like, "What happens when people don't want a house or building anymore? How do we take it down? Can we do that?" which led us to talking about demolition and wrecking balls. They wanted to know what kind of truck held a wrecking ball so we found some pictures online. Google's "images" option is so helpful sometimes.

Anyway, after that we found a medium-sized ball and I jimmied some sort of a net around it with yarn. The yarn was then threaded through a key ring that I taped (with strong tape) to the top of a doorway. Now we had two ends of the yarn to deal with. One side pulls the ball up and down and the other end holds the ball. For us, it worked best to let one kid hold the up and down end of the string tight; while the other kid got to hold the ball, determine angle and let it drop. Then we'd switch. The kids LOVED it! They could hardly wait until it was their turn. And so it went. Construct, demolish. Construct, demolish. For...oh...hours. When I finally made them stop, they immediately started pestering me for when the next time would be that they would get to do the wrecking ball. So, the next day we did it again. And the next. And now we're taking a break, but I had to promise them that we could do it again another day next week...and so forth.

Unlike the author of this idea, I called this activity "demolition observation" because I'm afraid I'm not much up on the "science" of a wrecking ball and I didn't feel like I could very accurately explain any of the forces at work here. So we mostly just observed and played around with dropping the ball at different heights and angles to achieve complete demolition and destruction of whatever building or city we had constructed. Even though I didn't spend time explaining too much of it to the kids, I think they learned a ton just by participating. All in all, a complete 100% successful activity! One I would whole-heartedly recommend to any mother of boys.

P.S. I'm sure girls would like it too, but I don't have any daughters so I really couldn't say.

P.P.S. Next time I'm going to use string because we found that the yarn broke pretty easily. Just FYI.