Last June, I had the GENIUS idea to lean into “funschooling” for the summer. After a tough year, my kids truly needed to experience some pure joy. Since both kids love all things science, we spent the summer doing lots of hands-on STEAM learning. Bottle rockets are the perfect EASY summer stem activity and they were such a HUGE hit with all the kids in our science club.

Here’s how it works:

• Get a big bottle

• Fill it with vinegar

• Pop some baking soda into a little wad of paper towel and drop it into the bottle

• Stick a cork on it and RUN! ***This part should be done by adults. I take no liability for bottle rocket experiments!

Why is this the BEST STEM CHALLENGE for Kids?

The thing that makes this an awesome STEM activity is that you end up teaching engineering design thinking in the process. The hard part is that you have to figure out how to keep it from falling over, how to make sure the cork can move freely, and so forth. But this is the fun experimental part that kids will love to do. When you get it right, the bottle rockets REALLY GO far. I’m talking 20 - 30 feet in the air. It’s a GREAT show and would make a super fun family activity for the Fourth of July too.

We had a showdown of various launch systems. The iterative design process REALLY worked and I’m so glad we made time and had enough materials to do this many times so we could fix the duds.

So you want to build bottle rockets with your kids?

Sure, you could just try and follow some random blog post on the internet. OR… you could download my totally super awesome and complete ULTIMATE GUIDE to Rocket Science for kids.

Here’s what you get:

• Amazing diverse book recommendations

• Engaging videos

• A great how-to about the design process

• Tracking sheets for your designs

• Printable organized step-by-step activities

• Killer content-based vocabulary learning

• Play-based math

With all that you are SURE to avoid the dreaded summer “brain drain.” Oh, and we also manage to profile some inspiring women in STEM, because diversity in stem education is a core value here. So, check it out! I’m grateful for your support of my small home-based business.