One of our favorite places to visit is the Boston Museum of Science.  At the Museum of Science they have an amazing room just for toddlers and in this room they have a huge magnetic wall that has different sized and shaped PVC pipe secured to huge magnets.  There is also a mechanism that sucks up little ping pong balls and drops them down a shoot at the top of the magnetic wall. The children can rearrange the magnetic PVC pipes to create different paths for the balls to drop down.  This is my son’s favorite part of the museum and he could spend hours playing with the ball run.

I started thinking more and more about the different elements of the ball run and decided it wouldn’t be very difficult to recreate a ball run that had moveable pieces for our home.  It was super fast, easy and inexpensive to build and my son has played with it for hours!  Nothing like bringing a little taste of the Museum of Science home with us. 🙂 

Supplies Needed: 

• Large Piece of Cardboard
• Lots of Toilet Paper Rolls
• Paper Towel Rolls
• Felt Fabric Sheet
• Velcro 
• Pom Poms
• Paint (optional)

Set Up:  

1. Cut your cardboard to the size you want your ball run to be.  I choose a piece that was about my son’s height and I left a flap of cardboard along the bottom so it would have a little bit better balance.
2. Cover your cardboard with your felt fabric sheet.
3. Paint your toilet paper and paper towel rolls.
4. Add a small square of the hook side of velcro to each cardboard tube.  We found that they worked best when we did once piece at each end, even on the small rolls because they stuck to the felt better.
5. Finish by sticking your velcroed pieces to the felt and start sending the pom poms down the shoot. 

Additional Ideas: 

• If you want curved piece cut one of your rolls on a diagonal in the middle and rotate it around so the long parts of the diagonal are next to each other and short parts are next to each other.  I secured it with a two pieces of masking tape, glue would also work great.
• We played with pom poms, bouncy balls and little toys cars are also fun.
• If you have older children it would be fun to set up tasks for your children to figure out, such as start the balls in the top right corner and find a way to get them clear over to the bottom left corner, or some other place. 

Thanks for reading!

Have you tried to make a ball run?  I would love to see the ball run you’ve created or hear about any of your experiences or thoughts to make it better in the comments section.