President’s Day Stem Lessons + Diy Activities (3-8)

President’s Day is usually a blizzard of construction paper top hats and trivia nobody remembers. Here’s how to teach actual engineering standards using the monuments we built for them.

Free DIY Activities – Grab These First

Most “President’s Day” online content is just another craft. These are easy DIY activities with actual standards alignment to get kids back to fun learning. 

🚀 Grades 3-5: Egg Drop Challenge DIY

This creative DIY activity allows students to experiment and put your designs to the test! 

🚀 All grades: Paper Table Challenge DIY 

This easy DIY activity allows learners to hold up a book with just some paper and tape. 

All  DIY science activity is no-to-low cost, under 30 minutes, easy to make, and has a small list of supplies. 

Start Here: The Misconception That Ruins Everything

Ask your students how the Washington Monument stays up. Write down what they say.

Most will tell you it’s held together by some kind of super-glue or “giant screws.” They’re wrong—and if you don’t surface this belief before teaching, it’ll still be there in June.

Here’s the fact that makes them pay attention: The Washington Monument is essentially a 555-foot pile of stone held together by gravity and precisely calculated leaning.

Think about it like this: if you stack your phone, a stapler, and a coffee mug perfectly, they stay up. If the wind blows, they don’t. The engineers had to figure out how to stack 33,000 stones so perfectly that even a hurricane wouldn’t turn it into a very expensive pile of gravel.

That’s the whole thing. Everything else is details.

President’s Day STEM Resources by Grade

H2: Grades 3-5: Building Like a Founder

At this age, kids think “engineering” means “fixing a car.” They need to see that it’s actually just a formal way of solving a problem—like how to honor a president without the building falling over on the tourists. We focus on the “trial and error” phase because, let’s be honest, their first attempt at any DIY is going to collapse.

Engineering Design for Kids video 

Grades 6-8: Architecture & The Physics of Power

Middle schoolers have a high “cringe” threshold for holiday crafts. Skip the Lincoln Log cabins. Instead, hit them with the Structural Engineering lesson. Talk about compression, tension, and why the dome of the Capitol building doesn’t crush the people standing under it. It turns a boring history lesson into a “how is this not falling down” physics puzzle.

Structural Engineering Design for Kids video 

The “I Have 20 Minutes Before the Long Weekend” Version

No time to prep? Here’s exactly what to do:

Minutes 1-5: Ask the “How does the Washington Monument stay up?” question. Let them discuss.

Minutes 6-15: Play the Engineering Design Process video.

Minutes 16-20: Hand out index cards. Tell them to build the tallest structure that can hold the weight of a stapler.

That’s it. You taught a core standard while the rest of the hallway is probably on their second round of worksheets that has nothing to do with science.

President’s Day is more than just a day off and some cherry tree myths. It’s an excuse to look at the massive engineering feats we built to remember them.

Don’t let the “holiday fatigue” win. Use the videos, check out the DIY activities, and actually teach some physics.

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