Recycled Material Marble Run

Marble runs are a great way to show how ramps work. I also love this activity because you can usually find things around your house to build your own. We used toilet paper rolls, paper towel rolls, boxes, and empty water bottles to design ours, but you can get really creative and add some LEGOs, use Little Bits, or any other toys to enhance your marble run. You can even stretch this project out over a few days by having the kids draw a blueprint for their plan, and then painting or decorating their marble run. The sky is the limit as far as how you want to do this activity.

If you want to do this activity you may want to plan ahead, especially if you're going to be using recyclables in order to build your ramps. Here's the supplies we got : paper towel rolls, tissue rolls, water bottles, and boxes. By the way, if you have a Nespresso, those Nespresso pod tubes make great ramps as well! You'll also need to have basics like scissors and tape. We used masking tape because it sticks better to our walls without ripping the paint off. You'll also need a marble or a small ball. We had a few marbles, but we ended up using the tiny balls from our Hungry Hungry Hippos game.

We put up ours in the hallway, but you can do this indoors or outdoors. We made sure that the ramps weren't too steep or too flat. When it was too steep, it made the marble go too fast, and it would sometimes bounce out of our marble run or destroy parts of it. When it was too flat, it would get stuck. Here's where you may have to test and re-test your design to make sure it works.

We even got a little fancy and made a little marble shelf to store our marbles using the bottoms of the water bottles we used. We also found a slide from our Playmobil set that we thought would be fun, so we put it at the end of our marble run, and of course a bucket to catch our marbles at the end.

We made a two sided marble run so that two marbles can go at the same time, and also experimented to see if using heavier marbles went faster or slower.

I hope you all try this activity and have fun with it! I'd love to see your designs, so follow me on Instagram @catwiessbrod and use #whatididtoo when you share your creations!