A Space Adventure - Day 2 - Week 3 (Mark Day School)

I might be slightly obsessed with space this week. I love this theme and I invited my fellow collaborators to come to the Creativity Lab (where we have our circles and do our building) at 7:30am to watch NASA’s live broadcast of the first images from the James Webb telescope.

So, naturally, we shared one of these impressive photos with our tinkerers and Hope (our junior collaborator and science aficionado) gave us an overview of what we were seeing.

A “star nursery” courtesy of NASA at https://nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

Today, we made the transition from two-dimensional shapes (flat squares of wood) to three-dimensional ones (boxes). This wasn’t lost on our tinkerers who spoke during our closing circle of “progress” and “moving forward” when we asked about highlights of their day. This transition helps to further our story which is about our mission to build a spaceship and a space shelter. We also shared gratitudes during circle. And there were many. Kids spoke about making new friends and about ways they had collaborated (one of our goals!) to build a chair together or help each other to clamp wood so it could be connected with screws. And kids shared about trying harder than usual (another goal!). We work hard in this camp and when we work as a team, amazing things happen.

Learning from experiments with pulleys! How can we launch the ship?

Building a chair included figuring out what a comfortable back should look like.

Why do we do tool training on Monday? Because once tinkerers know how to use our three main tools (clamps, drills and chop saw), they don’t need to ask permission — except for the chop saw which requires an adult standing next to them. They can just grab a drill or clamp off of the tool wall and add to our collective build. It’s empowering for kids to know what needs to be done, to know how to do it (with occasional guidance from us about tricky situations like drilling low to the ground), and to just… do it.

We’re using lots of assembly squares this week. And we develop our own language around tools. It’s important for kids to know the “real” names for things but a shorthand also comes in handy when we can say “who wants to go get 4 black L’s?” Sometimes adults pick some really odd names for things. What does an assembly square do? It helps us join wood at right angles. And L’s have right angles, too, so it’s a helpful reminder about the tool.