February Reading Posters and Valentine’s STEM Activities

Candy Heart Catapult

Send hearts flying with this STEM activity! Created by Joy in the Works, this engineering-based STEM activity can be used for hands-on learning. Depending on the age of your students, you can make this activity easy or challenging. You’ll only need a few supplies to get started.

• Conversation hearts
• Valentine’s M&M’s or other Valentine’s candy
• Jumbo craft sticks
• Rubber bands
• Plastic spoons
• Plastic cups (optional)
• Masking tape (optional)
• Sharpies (optional)

For younger patrons, have students gather into groups of two or three and create one catapult based on this design by Devin Collier. Once students have created their catapults, they can then try to catapult the candy hearts into the plastic cups.

If you’d like to create a more challenging activity, you can have students design their own catapults using the materials above. Once students design their first catapult, they will catapult their conversation hearts to see how far they’ll go, then use masking tape and a sharpie to record how far the hearts flew. Students will next design a second catapult, and again record how far their hearts went. You can use this worksheet from Scholastic to walk students through the lesson of creating, evaluating, and analyzing their designs.