Step-by-step tutorial
Step 1
Challenge #1: Five Things is (of course) to find five things the magnet could pick up, and then five things the magnet couldn't pick up. Here's what my six-year-old came up with. The great thing about this challenge is that you can repeat it as many times as you like! If the toy bin starts to get stale, you can move the hunt into the kitchen, or go dig through the office supplies
Step 2
When we'd had enough fun finding things to pick up, we moved on to Challenge #2: Measuring Magnets. When we did this activity in my son's kindergarten class, we used little printed grids to measure how close the magnet had to be to pick up a paperclip. For home use, I figured we'd keep it simple, and the kids got a kick out of using blocks to measure with. We discovered that the hole punch was a two-block-magnet, while the scissors were a three-block-magnet. And the big surprise was that the Magnatile was a half-block-magnet.
Final result!
Finally, Challenge #3: Magnet Pickups! I couldn't find paperclips, so we went with safety pins. The goal here is to build the longest chain you can. For extra credit, measure how long the chain is with the blocks!
