Dear reader,
We needed something fun at our house as we are about to hit major harvest season and be pretty busy, so I searched through multiple ideas and found a picture that turned a clothespin into a catapult. It seemed basic enough, so my thought was, “eh, why not.” To be fair, I probably would never bother if we haven’t been challenging ourselves to play with our kids intentionally.
I could easily reverse engineer what I saw in the picture, as it used a block of wood, a clothespin, a large popcicle stick (we always called them tongue depressors. Is that still a thing?), And a lid from a juice container.
The picture had the clothespin glued into the middle, but as we (my husband and I) tested it out before we showed our daughter, it was incredibly pathetic, hardly doing anything except shoot straight up; and not that far, either. So we pulled it off (as best we could. I gave up on the last piece after the clothespin broke and I had to go get another one.
Moving it to the end helped a ton. It gave much more leverage to the clothespin. Tossing anything heavier than the marshmallows turned out to be a disappointment, too, but marshmallows worked pretty well. So we showed the catapult to our daughter, and all took turns shooting the marshmallows to the target plates.
As far as catapults go, this one isn’t that great, but it was super easy, and my preschooler can operate it herself (although it definitely helps if I hold the base). If my preschooler were a little older, I would make a few other types of catapults and we could have a science day trying them all out and comparing them and then learning what works best and why.
But for now, we are just having fun. And there will be more chances to experiment. Interestingly enough, her favorite part wasn’t shooting the catapult… it was collecting the marshmallows. And it gave all of us a nice reprieve from picking apples, harvesting green tomatoes, and all the adventures of storing food for winter.
