cats and canes

I can usually get my lower elementary school kids interested in anything if it involves cats and unicorns. So yesterday we made cat boxes with pivot lids. One made a caticorn and another a unicorn box. The pivot lids make use of small wooden parts originally intended for use as axles to attach wheels to toy wooden cars.

To install a pivot lid you just drill a hole of the right size to fit the pin and glue the pin in place. You must avoid getting glue on the lid as that would stop it from moving altogether. Pivot lid pins can be found at this site: https://www.bearwood.com/wood-toy-axle-pegs.html

We also applied finish to the canes being made by our middle school students for the local medical clinic. You can go on instagram https://www.instagram.com/douglasstowe/ to see students with the canes we have made. We will present the canes to the clinic next week and have made an appointment with the lead doctor to do so.

On instagram, I also have a picture of the cat box I made as a model. A principle of Educational Sloyd is to move from the concrete to the abstract, and we are always better equipped to fulfill what is expected of us, if we are engaged in concrete learning (doing real things), and learning from the concrete (the real world). That is a lesson most policy makers and administrators would do well to grasp. It is why music, the arts, scientific experimentation, service learning, field trips, outdoor studies and physical education enormously enhance rather than detract from actual learning.

My student who made the cat box shown wanted to make certain that you knew it was not finished yet. What artist wants you to judge their work before it is complete? She handed me a piece of paper and asked me to write, "I'm not finished," on it.  She cut the shape to be like a cartoon word bubble so that her unfinished box could talk. Clever, no?

The cat boxes we made for holding their word puzzle cards had to be kept at school for use, so the students were all very happy when I told them they could take these home. If you made one at school, what would you want to do with it?

Make, fix, and create...