Grabber Toys

We made grabber toys while learning about levers in morning STEAM. This is a new favorite project for myself and the kids! It was a perfect match for my K-2 group in terms of required motor skills, steps involved, and topic. They loved the outcome.

For this project, I precut strips of cardboard- each student had 6 pieces, each measuring 1"x8". They were also given a sharpened pencil to make holes in the cardboard (3 total holes on each piece- one on each end and one hole in the middle). After making the holes, students were given brass fasteners and told to make X's out of their cardboard, attaching one brad into the center holes to create the X. Next, they attached their X pieces together by placing brads in the upper and lower holes. After their main construction was finished they were given popsicle sticks to reinforce the cardboard and rubberbands to make the end of their grabbers more sticky. Many finished with extra time, so made little objects out of paper and cardboard for their grabber to pick up.