Shelter/Fort Building Challenge: Using materials around your home or outdoor space to build forts!
Materials Needed:
- Large Scale/Human Sized
- Indoors: Use pillows and blankets.
- Outdoors: Use branches, tarps, lumber and whatever you can find.
- Small Scale/Flat Stanley Sized – A Flat Stanley is a human shape drawn on a piece of paper and can be used to build a smaller shelter at the appropriate scale.
- Indoors: Use Legos or blocks
- Outdoors: Use twigs, leaves, and whatever you can find.
Safety First: Make sure all materials, actions and activities are safe to use for all participants and for the venue you are building in.
Activities:
- Challenge yourself and your team to one of the challenges below , or if you have enough materials and people, compete to see who can meet the challenge best!
- Largest or Tallest Fort: How many people or Flat Stanley’s can fit inside?
- Strongest Fort: Determine a safe way to test your fort’s structural integrity. Ideas include: use a trash can lid to send a wave of wind at it, bombard it with stuffed animals or playground balls, or remove one piece at a time Jenga style until it collapses!
- Outdoor Only: Best Protection from the elements. Use an appropriately sized water container and dump water on top of your fort to see how much gets through! A Flat Stanley can be a good indicator, if the paper gets what, the shelter didn’t perform!