Monsters! All Girls Week - Session 5 - Day 1

...It's All Girls Week! And we're making Monsters!

But first, we had important some business to take care of. 

Mondays are sometimes hard for this reason.

Despite that our focus is hands on making, on Mondays, there's a lot of talking by the adults. We make a lot of agreements about how to treat each other and the space. We learn a lot of information about how to use complicated tools safely. We learn why it's best not to yell across a giant warehouse to get others' attention and why it's important to safely ask for the attention of others. 

As Collaborators, we also share a lot of antidotal information about our experiences working with wood and tools and peers.  

And for the kids, we all this new information is a lot. So, we create situations where hands on learning is privileged over direction instruction -- where the Tinkerers can get to know the new tools and themselves by failing and figuring it out. 

The kids are also learning how to work as a team -- and for many of them, this is their first time meeting one another. That aside, we hop right in and ask them to ask each other for help when they need it, and not rely too heavily on the direction of the adults. 

...And this is all just the first couple morning hours of Monday. 

So, in the afternoon, we got right down to more interesting business. 

This week, the theme is Monsters, and we are starting with three main projects: Monster Trucks, and a combined team project where one team is making one half of a monster, and one team is making the other half. The teams are creating their halves without communicating, and at the end of the week, they will join their creations together! 

After the introduction of the theme and the projects, we designed, and got down to building.

Tomorrow, with all that formal agreements and training and getting over the shock of a new team and a new environment out of the way, we get to build all day!