Grandpa Richards Kids

I tend to be a big fan of those small containers of yogurt. When I am done with them, I rinse them out, let them dry, and then put them away. The next time my granddaughter comes over, one activity that we sometimes enjoy together is yogurt container stacking. When she was younger, she had to learn how to stack them properly in order to get them as high as possible. One mistake that she often made is to try and stack the next layer without centering the cups properly. Eventually her wall of yogurt containers would fall over on their own. Once I helped her to understand the proper stacking technique, we would be able to get them as high as possible using all the containers I had. Then what?

Out came a soft spongy ball, and we would play a form of bowling. With the number of containers I had saved we would have a wall that was so big that one throw of the ball would not knock them all over. That is when we would come up with some system of keeping track of who knocked over the most, without actually counting them.

One other valuable lesson that my granddaughter learned is that creating a perfectly straight wall of containers fell over more easily then when you created a wall that had a slight curve to it. What is very interesting is that a beaver dam that we once discovered was built the same way, with a slight curve. It has always amazed me that a critter we consider to have very little brainpower knew enough to build a curved dam. Quite the engineers, aren’t they?