Every year, I try to come up with fun, educational, and unconventional experiments or activities that my kids can do during the holidays. I dropped an egg this morning while making breakfast, and while cleaning up the mess, a fun activity for Easter occurred to me! Thought I’d share my idea…

This Easter, I challenged my kids to come up with some kind of “invention” or “gadget” that would prevent an egg from breaking when the egg is dropped from a window of our house onto our patio. We have three levels, so the Egg Drop Challenge was to drop the eggs from the second story windows and then the third story windows.

Whenever I present my kids with a challenge, I typically follow this sequence:

1. I encourage them to brainstorm ideas first. They can use our whiteboard or notepaper to record their brainstorming ideas. All ideas are welcome; no criticism (at this point, there are no bad ideas).
2. I ask them for a “reasonable” list of things they think they would like to use for supplies. Most of the time, we have what we need around the house, but occasionally I need to buy a few supplies – “No, I will not buy that nuclear reactor you need!”
3. After the supplies are gathered, I leave them alone to create and invent, only offering assistance when asked. This allows them to really get creative on their own!
4. When they are ready to test their ideas, I supervise when needed. Since we were throwing things out a third story window this time, supervision was an obvious must.
5. If my kids are successful on the first try, I encourage them to “upgrade”. If they are not successful on the first try, I encourage them to figure out what may have prevented them from being successful, and guide them with open-ended questions to help them figure out what they could do differently for the next round.

Throughout whatever activity my kids are doing, they ask questions and try different things to find the answers. I help them with answers when they are really stumped, but I keep it “light-hearted” so it is still fun for them.

Each of my boys are very competitive, yet they can work well together, too. They have such different ideas and methods, and they realize this, so they enjoy working together. When they say “that’s not possible!”, my standard reply is always “NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE!” (which I believe completely). My kids are so programmed to this response, that now they just say… “I know, I know – nothing is impossible” – and they don’t give up!

For this activity we went through about a dozen eggs. Now, before you say “Oh, what a waste of food, with so many hungry people in this world!”, I can say we only wasted one. The secret? We placed each egg in a sealable plastic bag! Even when the eggs broke apart on impact (yes, we had a few “failures”), we were able to pour them out of the bags, pick out the shells and cook them up for an Egg Drop Omelette! Oh, and the one egg that broke free of the plastic bag onto the patio will quickly be consumed by night critters – so it won’t go to waste at all.

Our Egg Drop Challenge was a lot of fun! My kids learned a lot, and came up with some very creative contraptions to protect their eggs. Who knows, this newly acquired skill could help them if they decide some day to be the next scientist to land a rover on a distant planet…

If you decide to take the Egg Drop Challenge with your family, we would love to hear about your kids successes! Digital pictures, diagrams, napkin sketches, etc. would be fun to see.

Have fun!
JayDee

P.S. Don’t forget to take pictures, or film the challenge!