The Smart Cookie STEM Challenge: A Team Building Toothpick Tower Activity
Bring your next read-aloud to life with The Smart Cookie STEM Challenge!
This toothpick tower activity combines literacy, engineering, and team building as elementary students work together to create a standing structure. It’s a hands-on way to encourage creative thinking while helping students recognize that everyone brings valuable ideas to a team.
Pair the challenge with The Smart Cookie to start a conversation about different strengths, learning through challenges, and discovering what makes each person unique. Then give students an opportunity to put those ideas into practice as they build together.
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Bring The Smart Cookie to life with a hands-on team building STEM challenge!
Elementary students work together to design and build a toothpick tower while practicing communication, creativity, and problem-solving. Pair your read-aloud with an engineering activity that encourages students to recognize their strengths and contribute to a shared goal.
Explore this book-inspired STEM lesson for classroom team building, your STEM lab, or a literacy and science connection. Save this idea for your next read-aloud STEM activity!
Start with The Smart Cookie Read-Aloud
Before introducing the challenge, read The Smart Cookie with your class. Invite students to think about the many ways people can be smart. Some students enjoy imagining new possibilities, while others notice details, ask thoughtful questions, or help a group work together.
Connect those strengths to the teamwork students will need during the activity. Ask:
What is something you feel proud of learning?
How can teammates help when something feels difficult?
What can we do when someone has a different idea?
Why might a team need more than one way of thinking?
These questions help set the expectation that every student has something to contribute.
Explore a marshmallow and toothpick tower challenge inspired by The Smart Cookie!
Elementary students work together to build a stable structure, investigate support and balance, and improve their designs. This team building STEM activity encourages communication, perseverance, and creative thinking while connecting engineering with a classroom read-aloud.
Give students room to try their own ideas and learn from each attempt. Save this marshmallow tower STEM challenge for your next hands-on lesson!
Build a Toothpick Tower Together
In this STEM challenge, students collaborate to build a toothpick tower. Building a structure gives teams a shared goal and a reason to communicate throughout the design process.
Encourage students to discuss their ideas before they begin. What could the bottom of their tower look like? How will they keep it standing? How can they combine ideas from different teammates?
As students build, invite them to notice what happens. A tower might lean, a connection might loosen, or a design might need more support. Each observation gives students useful information for deciding what to try next.
Rather than stepping in with a solution, ask questions such as, “Which part needs more support?” or “What could you change to make the tower more stable?”
Connect reading, engineering, and vocabulary with The Smart Cookie STEM Challenge!
This toothpick tower activity includes teacher instructions, a science explanation, and vocabulary cards for structure, strength, strategy, and perseverance. Help elementary students explore strong connections, wide bases, and supportive shapes as they collaborate on a tower design.
A hands-on team building STEM lesson for encouraging thoughtful discussion, creative problem-solving, and learning through trial and improvement.
Make Team Building Part of the Challenge
The engineering task is only part of the learning. The Smart Cookie STEM Challenge also gives students a chance to practice being thoughtful teammates.
Before building, establish a few simple teamwork expectations:
Listen when a teammate shares an idea.
Make space for everyone to participate.
Explain your thinking kindly.
Encourage one another when a design needs work.
Make decisions together.
During the activity, point out specific examples of collaboration. You might notice a student asking a quiet teammate for an idea or a group calmly discussing how to rebuild. Recognizing these moments helps students understand what successful teamwork looks like.
Simple materials can spark creative engineering!
The Smart Cookie Toothpick Tower STEM Challenge invites students to build with toothpicks and play dough while working toward a shared goal. Encourage teams to discuss their designs, explore stable bases, and make changes when their towers need support.
Pair this elementary STEM activity with The Smart Cookie for a hands-on lesson about teamwork, individual strengths, and perseverance. Save it for your STEM lab or classroom building activities!
Leave Time to Test and Improve
A tower that falls can lead to an important discovery. Encourage students to look closely at their structures and identify one change they want to make.
Would a wider base help? Does one side need more support? Could rearranging part of the structure improve its balance?
Giving students time to revise helps them practice perseverance and see engineering as a process. Their first idea is a starting point, and testing helps them decide how to improve it.
Help elementary students think like engineers with The Smart Cookie STEM Challenge!
Planning and reflection pages encourage students to identify their strengths, share strategies, and design a toothpick tower together. An engineering design process poster guides teams through asking, imagining, planning, creating, testing, improving, and sharing.
Connect your read-aloud to meaningful team building STEM as students sketch ideas, solve problems, and reflect on their collaboration.
Reflect on What the Team Learned
After building, bring students together to discuss both their towers and their teamwork. Ask each group to share one design decision and one example of how they helped one another.
Try these reflection prompts:
What worked well in your tower?
What did your team change?
How did a teammate help you?
What strength did you contribute?
What would you try differently next time?
Return to the read-aloud connection by reminding students that creativity, careful observation, persistence, and kindness all have a place in STEM.
Ready to connect a favorite book with hands-on learning? The Smart Cookie Toothpick Tower STEM Challenge gives students an opportunity to build engineering skills, discover their strengths, and practice working together—one toothpick at a time!
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