Buddy talked me into buying a bag of jumbo marshmallows when we were purchasing candy for our gingerbread houses. And of course, he only used one, which meant I needed other ideas for marshmallows. First, we painted with the marshmallows, and that was a lot of fun. (Read more about that activity here.) But once that was done, we needed something else to do with all of our leftover marshmallows.

I found the idea for building with jumbo marshmallows from Kids Activities Blog. After pulling out some marshmallows and straws, I cut the straws into different sized pieces. I cut them at an angle so there was a sharp point to pierce the marshmallow at each end. Once I did that, I brought Buddy over, and I showed him how to stick the straws into the marshmallows.

Buddy started by making a square. Then he filled it up with all of the rest of the marshmallows. He had a pretty good stack in there before they started falling over.

After that, I showed Buddy how to make a building. We worked together to build a triangular pyramid shaped building together. Then, we tried to make a cube. It was a little tricky for Buddy to build on his own, so he preferred making two dimensional shapes.

This was a fun and easy activity that could be done at many different ages. Preschoolers like Buddy may be better off working on two dimensional shapes, and older kids should be able to build three dimensional ones. I’d like to do this activity again when Buddy’s a little older to see what he can do.

Do you have any other ideas for using up marshmallows? Please share in the comments if you do.