Build these seasonal magnetic tile ideas while celebrating the spring season and its holidays – Easter, Earth Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Mother’s Day, and others.
Spring is a season of rebirth and rejuvenation. Children’s relationships with their toys can be seasonal too, waxing and waning with their interests, novelty, and inspiration. In the spirit of spring, we offer this pack of building ideas to revitalize your kids’ engagement with their magnetic tiles.
Spring itself is inviting enough a subject, but it gets even more varied and engaging when you consider the different holidays, internationally observed days, and culture-specific celebrations that happen then. We included Women’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, Day of Human Space Flight, Earth Day, Cinco de Mayo, and even May the Fourth (Star Wars Day)!
Paired with our idea cards, these observances could make great changing themes for a STEM workstation in your classroom or homeschool room, inspiring children to tackle challenges.
Which Magnetic Tiles to Use
There are quite a few interchangeable magnetic tiles on the market these days; Magna-Tiles, Picasso Tiles, Connetix, and Shape Mags. The quality and details vary, but they all work well, and they all work together. Some sets come with specialized tiles with wheels or architectural elements, but what we have always valued them for is open-ended – and even educational – use.
There is some satisfaction when building with our oldest and scruffiest magnetic tiles in remembering that we used them to help our son learn letters, numbers, shapes, and animals. We have covered a lot of bases with them, and in making a start with this spring set, we hope to eventually add something for all the seasons.
Why Use Spring Magnetic Tile Ideas?
If your children love building with magnetic tiles, this pack of printable magnetic tile designs can inspire conversation about special calendar dates! Vice versa, if your children are the kind who jump out of their skin to learn that a day is being celebrated as something special by someone somewhere in the world, then this pack can give life to the old toy by challenging them to represent some of the symbols of those holidays.
Making use of an old toy is a perfectly adequate reason to print prompt cards, but you can feel even better about it knowing there are two deeper educational reasons for using them:
One, the cards act as puzzles, like tangrams, to figure out and build. Each card presents a good enough view of the model for children to be able to figure out how it was constructed, however, it requires some thinking and engineering skills to build a copy of it, especially the 3D designs. It also naturally involves the math skills of recognizing the shapes and counting the pieces out.
Two, the cards act as inspiration for future builds. Either by learning some new technique through building one of our magnetic tile ideas or by thinking of a different branch of subject matter than had been considered before.
Inside the Spring Magnetic Tile Ideas Pack
• 32 magnetic tile designs (21 three-dimensional designs and 11 two-dimensional designs)
• the printable cards come in two scales (four cards per page that is a convenient card size and one design per page that is closer to full-scale and easiest to replicate)
• designs dedicated to spring themes and various holidays that happen during spring:
- International Women’s Day (female symbol)
- St. Patrick’s Day (shamrock, rainbow, leprechaun’s hat)
- International Day of Human Space Flight (space shuttle)
- Easter (2D egg, 3D egg, egg basket, chick)
- Earth Day (recycling symbol)
- May the Fourth/Star Wars Day (Yoda)
- Cinco de Mayo (cactus, sombrero, and guitar)
- Mother’s Day (words “mom” and “MOM”, flowers)
- general spring theme (rubber boots, umbrella, seedling, daffodil, watering can, birdhouse, frog and frog’s life cycle)
Get the Pack of Spring Magnetic Tile Ideas!
Also try!
Make pop-up bird egg cards, featuring a real-life egg and the bird who lays it!
Looking for more Magna Tiles designs to try? Here are our favourite Magna Tile ideas to build, with printable cards for inspiration.
Thanks for reading!
These are great ideas!