What an exciting gift I received the other day! A former parent and benefactor has left us a set of building toys! Materials like these write their own lesson plans! Gross motor skills and fine motor skills developing along with open ended, hands-on engineering. It’s all here.
BTW, join us for our upcoming Open House (update: this event is over).
I am unfamiliar with this set of building toys, and I wouldn’t normally go out and purchase something like this, but when it (almost literally) lands in your lap, you embrace it!
Some of the students were very interested and we looked at the book together to pick out a project. I began by assigning each student who wanted to be involved a certain number of parts. They had to search for and count the correct number of specific parts. This is challenging. Some of the parts are color coded, but just because it is green doesn’t mean it is the right part. They had to distinguish the number of joints it had and I helped with that when necessary.
After we had all of the required parts sorted, I would assign specific tasks until we began to get some semblance of the desired product. I helped when needed, but always waited until they had given it a solid try. Connecting the individual clips was tricky, and I had to slide or rotate the tubes sometimes to line them up properly, but, they got pretty good at doing it on their own.
We had a lot of fun, and I wasn’t surprised at how quickly they lost interest in it once it was completed. The fact is, following directions and all the cognitive skills necessary to locate the parts was a lesson on its own. The gross and fine motor skills required for pushing the tubes into the joints and then the clips to hold them together takes a lot of concerted effort on the children’s part.
I will continue to make myself present for running requested projects, but I hope to see more freeform and spontaneous building as the kids explore self-guided experiments. Following a pre-conceived project is good practice for understanding the principals of the materials, but, in the long run, I hope to see them build new and innovative things. Now that they understand the mechanics of how the pieces fit together and are aware of the potential, I hope their imaginations run wild!
