One day I was thinking about dominoes. I have always liked to topple dominos when I was young but only did a little set. Never combined sets. The same day I was thinking about it, my boss was throwing some 3/8" mdf (medium density fiber) board away and I said something about making dominos for a topple and he suggested using that. So I took it home and started making blank dominos. Over several years I now have over 5000 dominoes with lots of stairs, balls, pendulums, a spiral stair case, and even a seven foot stair case to go from the floor to table height and even added another 18" stair case to go up to a 36" counter.
I am involved teaching children and what I do when we have a domino topple, is I mark about a 3 to 4 foot square on the floor and each child picks a square and does their own domino set up. This takes about a hour or so. I also help the children set up. The children then go off and do something else. I then look over their set ups, make any corrections I see and I then connect them making it one big topple. They have a lot of fun doing it and it teaches them team work, patience, and also the anticipation to see them fall in just a few seconds. The first year I did it, the children just screamed their heads off.
On the other pages are some pictures of the stunts I use with the dominoes to make them more fun. I also have several videos on YouTube which you can watch (the videos are below). I hope you like this page and maybe even do a small domino topple for your own children or children you work with. It is a blast.
The first one I did had about 2500-3000 and the second one had about 5000 dominoes (every domino I had). I have videos on YouTube of most of the topples I have done. I also did a small one with a american flag for the men's ministry and another where we had a few men set up about 500 or so dominoes at a Men's Ministry Night event, I also did an American falg on that one too which had about 200-300 dominoes. I did another one as an object lesson for the Awana T&T boys and girls. (no video on that one). I spent several days setting up only black and white dominoes on about five 8 foot tables. I think I used about 1500 dominoes. I made two seperate paths. I talked about making both good and bad decisions. Then we went into the room and I had one boy and one girl pick which domino they wanted to push down. The white one (represented good) and the black one (represented bad). Explaining how our decisions whether good or bad can effect us thoughout our entire life just like one domino affects the very last domino. In 2010 in early May I am planning to do another children domino topple. I did a domino topple in May or 2010 with only about 2000 dominies. Some of the kids got in the way and the video did not turn out. I hope do to it again and maybe use most of my 5000 dominoes. I even came up with a few more tricks. The video below is the first one I did at Circle Drive Baptist Church for the Awana Club program. There was about 3000 plus dominoes.
The video below is the second domino topple I did at Circle Drive Baptist Church for the Awana Club program. There was about 5000 dominoes.
The video below is the first one I did at Pikes Peak Park Baptist Church for the Awana Club program.This is the third domino topple I have done with the children setting up thier own. There was about 2000-2500 dominoes.