Today seemed ripe for a little cause-and-effect play with Veronika. We built a series of “ramps” out of books or board game boxes for her cars, and then experimented with them in multiple ways!

To start, I stacked up a few books and then set one at an angle as a ramp. I aimed for a medium incline with this first round, and showed her how to set a car at the top and give it a push. Gravity does the rest of course!

First, she simply experimented with driving the car up and then letting it go. She tended to let go in the middle of the ramp, not the top, but it was great for a toddler effort!

Now to add a little early STEM to the lesson. What if the stack was very low and our tilted book wasn’t steep at all?

She seemed more confused by this set-up than anything else, so I quickly changed the slope again. Now we had a really steep incline! She loved when we set two cars at once down the slide and made it a race.

From here, it turned into more of an engineering project, with a stack of books in the middle and multiple books angling down as ramps from all sides.

I let her explore any way she wanted, whether driving cars up the ramps, letting them race down, or sometimes just gathering them all near the top in a little parking garage.