Building Cars

I'm going to go back through my favorite projects that I've done. I love making things out of other things. This is great as a teacher, because it is much easier to save water bottles than it is to get a car kit for every kid.
I had a group that loved cars, really any transportation. Around the holidays all they could talk about was how they were going to get to their different destinations. Not who or where they were going to go, but how they were getting there. So we did a transportation month.
The first week was cars.
We painted with cars, by rolling their wheels in paint and then rolling them on the paper.

We also engineered our own cars. It was a fun project that I got to come up with, and the kids got to bring home a toy they can play with. Here is how we did it:
Supplies

Vitamin Water Bottles (They are thicker than regular water bottles and hold up to what you will do to them)
Long wind Chimes (from oriental trading company)
Round wood pieces (or Beads with a big enough hole to fit onto the wind chimes)
Hot Glue
A Drill

Pom Poms (optional)
Pipe cleaners (optional)

We started by drilling holes into the bottles to fit the wind chimes through. The Wind Chimes would become the axles. I did the drilling in class with the kids at a good distance. Some of the kids were so excited about a power tool being used in the class, they tried to take home the bottles with just the holes in them.
I then had the kids fit the "axles" through the holes. They had to figure out which holes fit together to get a straight axle. Then we proceeded to pick out matching wood pieces. They just needed two sets of two wheels. So that each axle had the same wheel on each side.
I did the hot glue part, affixing the wood to each side of the wind chimes that where now in the bottles.
We finished off the project with putting pom poms and pipe cleaners inside the bottles to make them pretty.

We then ran into a problem. To maintain structural integrity I had made the holes too high up the side of the bottles. So they "belly" of our cars kept them from being on all four wheels. We figured this out by making tracks on the floor. The wheels rolled along both sides on the blocks while the bottle hung down in the middle. They got to engineer the tracts as well, making sure the side where not to far apart and not to close, as well as keeping them straight.

We had so much fun, that we played with them all day for the next week. If they went home, they came back, because the kids couldn't put them down. It was so much fun.

We got to practice taking turns, balancing, and of course our engineering abilities. I can't wait to do this project again some day!