Toothpick and gum lolly fun for preschoolers

This afternoon I enjoyed some creativity time with my three year old son. We got a large supply of tooth picks and a couple of packets of jube lollies. He was very excited at the prospect of eating them more than building with them, but once he realised how much more stable our constructions would be than the playdough and toothpick ones we tried last week he was keen to build upon the base I began.

Here's last weeks playdough effort:

A pretty good start, but too flimsy.
The wonderful thing about using gum lollies is that they are so firm that the tooth pick can be reinserted in different places without worrying about having too many holes. This makes the height and load bearing opportunities for the structures we build to be much greater. Today it was triangular prisms and towers. Tomorrow we may try a bridge to get a car or train across.

I really enjoyed the language Mr Three used to explain what he was doing today. He decided to put my triangular based prism on top of a rectangular prism leaving him one corner and side short. He attached the triangle to the top two toothpicks then explained that it was sagging because there was nothing to support it. I questioned him about solving this problem and he decided to turn the triangle based prism into a square based prism on his own. It all fit nicely and he was rather impressed with himself, as was I with his problem solving skills.