Spielgaben STEM Challenge: Build and Fly a Magnetic Airplane

We’ve been having so much fun with our magnet unit that I wanted to prepare a magnet activity with our Spielgaben educational materials, too. My 3½-year-old granddaughter, Zoey, loved working with magnetic vehicles, so I decided to extend that work to building and flying a magnetic airplane.

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Spielgaben. All opinions are honest and my own. This post also contains affiliate links (at no cost to you).

In case you’re not familiar with Spielgaben toys, they are exceptionally high-quality educational toys designed for ages 3-12. You can see from the photo that the cabinet is very high quality and fits in well in a room with traditional Montessori materials. I love the easily removable drawers in version 4.

The Spielgaben complete set comes with over 700 pages of full-color printed learning materials. These printed materials help you as a parent or teacher easily use Spielgaben toys educationally with your child and/or students.

There’s also a cool magnet set that can be purchased separately.

Note: The yarn balls in set 1 are fine for babies and toddlers. The other sets should only be used with ages 3 and older unless your toddler no longer mouths objects or you are constantly supervising your toddler during an activity using the materials.

Spielgaben Materials Used in This Post

For this post, I used Spielgaben set #5B with wooden cubes, small triangular prisms, semi-circular columns, and cubes with curves on one side.

Spielgaben STEM Challenge: Build and Fly a Magnetic Airplane

For this STEM challenge, I used a a Multicraft tray and Montessori Services basket with Spielgaben wooden shapes along with “5B-2 Fly, Fly Airplane” page from Spielgaben Play Guide 1. Older children could get the Spielgaben materials from the Spielgaben cabinet themselves. I added a bar magnet and horseshoe magnet from our magnet kit plus tape for making an airplane with the wooden shapes.

First, Zoey arranged the wooden shapes to make an airplane. I helped her tape them both on the top and bottom so that all the parts were securely attached.

Then Zoey taped the bar magnet to the top of the airplane.

Time to fly! Zoey was excited to lift and fly the airplane using only magnets to hold the airplane in the air.

Zoey was so proud and excited that she had to show her grandpa as soon as he finished work and came down from his office. She showed it to Christina and Tom when they came to visit. And she showed it to her dad when he came to pick her up.

It was a great activity! I love that it combined so many different skills.

(Note: In case you’re wondering, Zoey’s outfit is from Gymboree!)

All My Spielgaben Posts

Many of these include links to free printables! (Click on an image to go to the related blog post. The gallery is ordered according to publication date with my latest post at the top.)

Version 4 of Spielgaben Educational Toys 

I highly recommend Spielgaben as an amazing educational material for home or school. Even though the toys aren’t inexpensive, they’re definitely worth the price because of the high quality of materials and number of years your children or students can use them.

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