Nothing says “kid” like a pillow fort – or treehouse, or snow fort, or any secret spot where the grown-ups can’t find your Jolly Rancher stash. In Crazy 8s we tapped that mischief to build forts out of paper beams, with addition and multiplication secretly mixed in!
They folded flat sheets of paper into colorful triangle tubes, which they stacked in Jenga-like towers. Each layer had to be a triangle or a square, so depending on the total beams, the kids had to figure out which factor (3 or 4) divided into it to use all the beams with no remainder.
Then they learned to fence like knights – almost like the real thing, except thankfully without 50-pound armor, swords or injuries. The kids rolled dice to lunge forward with their paper “sabers,” then removed layers of the towers to practice skip-counting down. And unlike the knights of yore, no one lost an ear or nose in the process.
At home you can go bigger and better with an even taller fort!
- Here’s our video on how to fold neon construction paper into “beams.”
- Make as many as you like, then test your Jenga skills and see how tall you can build!
- If you want a fort your kid can sit inside, make layers that are pentagons or hexagons. You’ll need more beams for the same height of layers, but the result is a real fort.
