People often mistakenly associate body smarts solely with gross motor coordination (e.g. sports, dance). But kinesthetic intelligence also encompasses fine motor skills. Take advantage of your kids’ excitement over tonight’s fireworks to flex your kids’ kinesthetic and visual-spatial mind muscles by creating a pop-up fireworks display.
Take 1 piece of dark or black construction paper and 1 piece of green construction paper and tape them together on one edge.
Next, have your kids cut out or create different shapes of fireworks out of a variety of media you’ve got in your house. Some examples:
- transform mini tissue paper flowers into fireworks
- cut firework shapes out of construction paper or card stock and glue glitter, sequins or beads to the cut outs
- print out pictures of fireworks you find online, then cut around the pictures down to just the firework
- cut up metallic fringe from your birthday party stash or old cut up an old party lei or two
Learn the names of the different kinds of fireworks and attempt to draw or recreate your favorite types.
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Then, use pipe cleaners to pierce the fireworks and pierce one hole in the black construction paper and one in the green construction paper. Bend 1/2″ of pipe cleaner behind the construction paper and tape them down. Have your child design the pop up card so that the fireworks are at varying heights and depths when the “card” is at a 90 degree angle.
Finally, close the card and glue or tape another sheet of cardboard or cardstock to the back of both the original sheets of construction paper to hide the pipe cleaner ends/tape.
Want to take the activity further? Decorate the pop up even further by cutting out “grass” to add to the bottom of the display, add stars or the moon to the background, draw people watching from the ground or place Polly Pockets / LEGO people on the grass watching the fireworks.
When you go out with your kids to watch the fireworks tonight, see if you can remember the names of the fireworks as they explode in the night sky.
Embedded video is of Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks in New York City by Mike Kobal.