Volume 30 Issue 25 20 Aug 2021 12 Elul 5781

Kornmehl

Terry Aizen – Director of Kornmel

Tinkering

“Children thrive when they have the opportunity to learn by doing.”

Tinkerer: one who experiments with materials and ideas to fully understand their capacities, and who further iterates on their learning to find better solutions to current problems. 

Tinkering is about hands-on experiences, learning from failures, and unstructured time to explore and invent. Through the processes of exploration and invention lies the potential for innovation.

Tinkering is important because it can help children understand how things are made, enable children to have focussed and unstructured time to explore and test ideas, and it’s at the heart of invention.

A tinkering station can be an assortment of supplies that children use to build and design, or it could be something like an old, broken clock that you allow children to open and take apart. Whether children are putting something together or taking something apart, these experiences encourage curiosity and a love of learning.

Tinkering involves open-ended exploration with different materials. It develops the capacity for innovative problem-solving skills, as a group or individually, and stimulates creativity and critical thinking. 

Children who are encouraged from an early age to tinker and solve their own problems develop a different way of thinking about the world. They understand experimentation, testing and failing. It is in our nature to explore and create things. It’s important to find ways to foster children’s curiosity and imagination.

Benefits of tinkering

  • Tinkering can satisfy a child’s natural curiosity about life and how things work. Tinkering is, without a doubt, lots of fun.
  • Tinkering is not just a hands-on activity. It is a way to develop thoughts and ideas that can lead to the next step, whether that is a more detailed design drawing or a possible prototype of a future innovation. 
  • Tinkering develops grit and perseverance – children must be flexible and resourceful when instructions are not available or do not exactly match the problem that is being addressed. 
  • Tinkering offers a great opportunity for the development of fine motor skills, involving the co-ordination of small muscles in the fingers and hands. Strong fine motors skills are necessary for tasks, such as writing and cutting.
  • Tinkering builds confidence, activates children’s creativity, and gives them a sense of purpose and accomplishment.
  • Children thrive when they have the opportunity to learn by doing. Hands-on learning is powerful and allows children to make connections. 
  • Tinkering activities build peer relationships in children of all ages. When we invite children to visit the tinkering station, there will often be multiple children at a time working together. These builds sharing and collaboration skills and supports the idea of teamwork.
  • Through tinkering, children are learning how to use basic hand tools safely and correctly.
  • Tinkering not only encourages children to think out of the box but invites them to embrace their curiosities through exploring and experimenting
  • Tinkering encourages problem solving, whereby children plan, build and figure out how to assemble the parts to make a whole new original idea. 
  • Tinkering resembles co-operative learning and project-based learning, both of which are proven to have long-term positive effects.

At Kornmehl, we have observed daily during play how children love to make things out of unconventional materials and love to take things apart too. We value the benefits of allowing children time to explore, create, and discover. In response to this thirst to learn, we have set up two tinkering stations, one indoors and one outdoors. 

We realise the need to provide children with a variety of open-ended loose parts, tools, and a lot of free time to explore and experiment. The children are loving using tools and a variety of materials to make some wonderful creations. It has been so beautiful to observe the children’s confidence, creativity, thinking and participation around the tinkering spaces. We want to give the children the tools and agency to change their world and the opportunity to think with their hands. By providing the children with these opportunities now in the early years, we are preparing them to become innovators of the future.

Some wonderful discussion and conversations take place as the children tinker and create: 

Levy: I was tapping holes in, and I felt like building something. I used the pliers to make it a bit looser.
Uriel: I was making a TV and I used a lot of elastics, I didn’t count them, so I don’t know how many there are.
Arlo: I love making musical instruments that you can play different sounds on.
Evan: My dad has all these tools at home, and he does lots of work.

“All life is an experiment. The more you make the better.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Thomas Edison

You might find the following two articles of some interest:

What you need to know about tinkering, making and engineering
The Value of Tinkering

Happy Birthday

We wish a very happy birthday to Noa Lewis (5) and Jesse Borovik (5). We hope you both had a beautiful day.