August 16th is National Roller Coaster Day! Even though we can’t get out to an amusement park safely at this time, we can still celebrate with some safe roller coaster fun at home!
Crafts are a great way to work on expanding verbal language, targeting speech sound production, and improve listening skills! Get crafty with a DIY marble run! We all know the good old toilet paper roll binocular craft but have you ever thought about using toilet paper rolls and paper towel rolls to build a roller coaster? All you need is a cardboard base, toilet paper and paper towel rolls, crayons/markers/paint (you choose), tape or glue, pom poms, and marbles!
Roller Coast #1:
- Cut holes (big enough for a marble to fit through) in a few of the different paper rolls to use as the towers.
- Then create shoots by cutting the top portion of the toilet paper roll off (so the roll looks like an open slide).
- Have your child decorate each of the different towers and shoots before assembling their marble roller coaster. This is a great way to use descriptive language to talk about the shape and size of the towers and the various ways to decorate each one.
- Once you’ve decorated everything, secure the shoots in place on each tower using tape or glue and have some fun!
Roller Coaster #2
Another way to create a roller coaster is to tape the paper towel rolls to the wall with different slants leading to different rolls. You can use different objects such as marbles and pom poms to drop into the shoots for races. Talk about the differences between the objects and how that impacts the speed of the object. Work on understanding 1st, 2nd, and 3rd by talking about what place each object comes in. After you’ve had some fun playing, you can have your child recall the sequence of events that were necessary to make the roller coaster and/or to play with the roller coaster.
Happy Roller Coaster day! If you can’t go to them, build them!