Earlier this week, the Obamas had 30,000 kids and their parents over for an Easter party on the White House lawn, and howtosmile.org was there!
On Monday, April 25, the 133rd annual White House Easter Egg Roll started at 7:30 am on a beautiful Spring morning; 5 groups of 6000 people had 2 hours apiece to enjoy
- * celebrity readings (including the President reading Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs & Ham),
- * musical performances from the likes of Greyson Chance (“the next Jason Beiber”) and Will Smith’s ten-year-old daughter Willow,
- * healthy cooking demonstrations from chefs such as Jacques Pépin and Top Chef finalist Carla Hall,
- * and a suite of hands-on outdoor science activities fitting this year's theme of “Get Up and Go.”
SMILE founding partner Lawrence Hall of Science contributed bunny copters and paper bag kites to the health-and-fitness themed melee. Thousands of easy-to-make paper copters twirled around the South Lawn, imprinted with the official 2011 Easter Egg Roll logo: an energetically hopping bunny. Paper bag kites—which take about 5 minutes to assemble from a paper lunch bag, streamers, and yarn, were another excellent choice for this high-energy historic event.
Planning your own event? Maybe you won’t need to entertain thousands, but you’ll want to be just as choosy about your activities as the White House was. Howtosmile’s filtered search might not have an option for “works for group sizes up to 6000,” but it will let you search by materials cost (say, free), prep time, subject matter, and age group (like from 6-8 years), to mention just a few ways to find your party-perfect hands-on science and math activities.
Besides the White House-sanctioned bunny copter and paper bag kite, also check out:
Wingin’ It: How high can you fly? Build and test an airplane wing with some paper, cardboard, skewers, and a fan.
Straws and Airplanes: Create airplanes from straws and geometric shapes. Test them out to see how far they can fly, or how accurately they can be aimed.
Bottle Blast Off: With little more than a plastic bottle, some vinyl tubing, and a length of PVC pipe, make a rocket and a rocket launcher and investigate how rockets fly.
Photo courtesy Lawrence Hall of Science; bunny logo courtesy of the White House