I’ve been on the lookout for fun and easy holiday activities to do with Buddy this December. Buddy loves playing with his magnatiles, so when I saw a jingle bell magnatile activity on AndNextComesL’s blog, I knew it would be perfect. This is a STEM activity, which means it builds skills in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics. This particular activity focuses on the science of magnets, engineering with building magnatiles, and mathematics of working with different types of shapes. 

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I ordered a bag of assorted jingle bells for this activity, which was perfect. Some of them were very tiny, though, so they’re definitely not appropriate for younger children. I put the bells in a small cup, and I told Buddy that we would be decorating trees with the bells. Buddy loved the ideas of the bells, but he wanted to build gingerbread houses instead. 

Buddy put the bells inside the cubes and along the edges as well. He kept adding more and more until we used almost all of the bells! Even though only parts of the edge are magnets, they still held a lot of the bells. 

After building the house, Buddy decided he wanted to put the bells on a train. He poured the bells into the middle of the train base, and he was surprised when they flew to the edges. I thought he would be excited by it, but actually, he was frustrated because he wanted to put some squares on the side instead. He carefully pulled each one to the middle, but when they got too close to the edge, they flew back to the magnets. It was a great science demonstration of the power of magnets. 

Once we had finished making the train, I decided to pull out our horseshoe magnet to experiment with the bells. We were able to pull the bells from the sides of our houses with the magnet. Then, Buddy stuck the end of the magnet into the cup of bells. He was delighted to see that a massive amount of bells stuck to it. 

Buddy had a blast with the bells, and we’ve already pulled them out again. On that day, Buddy was trying to get plastic pony beads to stick to the magnatiles like the bells, so we talked again about how magnets stick to metal. And then we pulled the bells back out to play. I’m sure this will be an activity we do every December for years to come, and I expect we’ll probably do it outside the holiday season too.