Tinkering

Vegetable-Dyed Easter Eggs

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This post was originally shared in April 2011. I’m trying to make a move away from synthetic food dyes and wanted to use natural, homemade dyes this year. Not only are these colors absolutely healthy for human consumption, but the process of making them is a wonderful lesson in creating art materials from scratch and [...]

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3 Tools that Build a Child’s Confidence

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Young children are full of their own ideas, confidence, and enthusiasm for the new. As much as we hope they’ll retain this strong sense of self, as they get older it’s possible that their confidence can diminish with the influence of peers or self-doubt that comes from not being able to bounce back from failure. [...]

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Tinker Tots: How to Take a Plush Toy Apart

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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.  Tinker Tots is a series of projects where I  share tinkering materials or tools that can be safely introduced as open invitations for children to explore and tinker. Materials Toy or [...]

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Why is Tinkering Important?

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I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. -Thomas Edison True to the name of this blog, Tinkerlab, I’m excited to start a new series called “Tinker With…” where I’ll introduce new tinker with materials, categories of materials, or tools that can be introduced as open invitations for children to explore. The first Tinker With… will [...]

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What is Tinkering?

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Tinker /ˈtiNGkər/ n.  to make small changes to something in order to improve or repair it (MacMillan Dictionary) You may have noticed this quaint little word that’s at the heart of my blog title, and today I’d like to talk a bit about tinkering. I have a fun tinkering challenge up my sleeve (come back for that next week!), so consider this my introduction! What is Tinkering? The definition above suggests [...]

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Art Project: Overhead Projector

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My husband works at a university and the collector in me was overjoyed to discover that there’s a little-known department on campus that sells surplus property from departments that no longer need old projectors, desks, and reams of paper. I wandered into the dusty space about a year ago and walked out with something everyone [...]

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Tinkering on the Typewriter

I’ve been thinking about getting an old typewriter for a long while (this post from The Artful Parent struck a chord, and I love how Jean set up a writing area around her typewriter), but since I’ve been on a purging streak since the first of the year it was hard to justify the purchase, [...]

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Machine Sewing with a Preschooler

The other day my 3-year-old asked if we could “look on the computer for an art activity” which I suppose says a lot about what computer time looks like in my house! So I opened up one of my favorite blogs, The Artful Parent, and saw that our friend Jean was sharing simple pyramid-shaped beanbags. N was intrigued [...]

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String Cup Telephone

I met up with the Los Angeles-based Trash for Teaching at the Maker Faire last weekend. Trash for Teaching is an organization that collects factory overruns and byproducts and redistributes them to teachers, schools, and museums for open-ended art making and tinkering. This is great for teachers with small materials budgets, inspiring for children to think [...]

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