Engineer a City: Combining STEM and Pretend Play

Do your kids like to design cities or build towers? Building is one of my kids’ favorite activities. Today I’m over on the Learning Resources blog sharing how we add pretend play into our STEM building projects. Learning Resources sent us the building set featured in the post.

Engineer a City: Combining STEM and Pretend Play

You’ll often find my kids setting up scenes for their toys and engaging in pretend play. They love creating building and backgrounds for their stories. This is where STEM and pretend play collide. In this case, we’re focusing on the engineering piece of STEM, but science and math skills are also at work.

Check out the city building set from Learning Resources. Kids can be inspired by the design cards and challenges to create zip lines, bridges, cranes, highways, towers, and more.

Here’s the crane Aiden built.

Lily had fun lifting up our elephants.

Her faces crack me up.

Head over to the Learning Resources blog and see our zip line (and more of the crane) and read more about how we incorporated the elephants into the play.