Making a-maze-ing marble mazes for the preschool classroom

I made a few marble mazes for my preschoolers to explore during our unit on marbles.  Sometimes, I get in this DIY mode and like to make little games or activities just to add a little extra something fun in the classroom…

My students found the mazes set out on the table with a container of marbles when they got to school that day. We also had the Magnetic Marble Tubes I shared about earlier and our Marble Painting that same day…

To make the marble maze, I cut up a few colorful straws into pieces and hot glued them into the bottoms and the lids of small gift boxes…

The tricky part of this was spacing the straws so the marbles could roll easily between each straw.  I wanted each maze to look a little different so I fiddled with them for a bit and then glued them in place…

This is the kind of DIY toy that I set out for the children to explore the first time, and then I leave in a basket in one of my centers for the children to choose from on future days…

It was also a good way to use up some of my left-over boxes.  The children played with the marbles and mazes off and on through out the morning…

It was hard to get good photos of the play in action since marble mazes invite constant, quick, movement of their hands…

It takes a little concentration and some good eye-hand coordination to move those marbles through the mazes without letting the marbles fall out of the box…

I thought about putting a plastic cover over the top of each maze but then I realized that some of the children will want to add more than one marble to the maze. Part of the challenge is trying to keep all the marbles in the box so I decided to leave the marble maze boxes a little bit more open ended for play and exploration…

I think I will introduce a few more “maze type activities” to my children in the up and coming weeks. I had three different ideas that were shared with me this past week that my class would just love. The first one is a tape maze from Jamie over at Hands on: as we grow…

To see the other two mazes I would like to try in my classroom, you will need to be able to log into Facebook.  These two videos are a-maze-ing!   You can view them on Facebook by clicking here and here! (At least I hope you can)!

Links to Grow On…

Love and Lollipops: Mommy Made Marble Run Game

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