Rube Thursday

Happy Rube Thursday, a day to celebrate Rube Goldberg machines, the over-engineered contraptions that perform a very simple task.

We haven’t built any new machines in a while. Instead we’ve been leafing through a couple of books, talking about complicated and funny contraptions found in them and creating no less complicated drawings for our future machines.

Hogwash by Arthur Geisert is a funny story about a whole lot of little pigs going out to play, first in the mud

And then at what appears to be an old paint factory.

As you can see, the piggies’ parents have a whole lot of cleaning up to do. And here I was thinking bath time at our house was tough. So what do mommy pigs and daddy pigs come up with? They do quite a wonderful job cleaning and drying the piggies.

Don’t you love the contraption? We read through this simple, yet charming story and looked through illustrations several times, each time noticing something new. A perfect activity to go along with this book, as we found out, is a water wall, such as this one

Or this one

Or this water wall that looks like a marble run (it’d probably work with small marbles too).