Invent an Insect - Day 5 - Week 4 (Mark Day School)

“Invent an insect, one with many legs and one with wings.” That’s the prompt we started with. We knew we’d need wood and screws and maybe a few other things along with lots of practice using tools. But otherwise, we didn’t know where this journey would take us. And that’s part of the magic of Summer Tinkering Camp at Mark Day School.

We expect tinkerers, kids ages seven to eleven, to imagine and then design and then build and then test… something that will align with our theme and our prompt. And we trust them. We trust that they will be clever and creative and collaborative (and we guide them as needed on this last aspect). And that they will work towards our camp goals of learning from mistakes and trying harder than usual. And that they will become adept at using tools to make things.

And we are without fail, always surprised and impressed when Friday afternoon arrives and we unveil our creations to families near and far (via this blog).

A note about this: if you were not able to join us today as we deconstructed every last screw from our insects then you may have missed a really transformative moment; our tinkerers spent about an hour carefully removing every screw and returning each piece of wood to their origins. We call this a “reset” and it’s a daily practice but the last reset of the week is bittersweet as we say goodbye to our creations while we keep them alive in our memories.

This was an especially young group of tinkerers. The average age was eight. But they found energy we didn’t know they had. And their smiles on the last day as they rode the insects and flapped Leppy’s wings and showed off their many exquisite build details (miniature legs, expressive faces, decorative ink swirls, kind messages, a dragonfly, a mouse!) warmed our hearts. This glimpse of something a little unusual, a little unconventional (kids with power tools?), a little hard to quantify is why we do this work, and we hope that it sparks conversations at home about what your kids are capable of and that they continue to ask, as we often do in camp, “How can I help?”

Here are videos and photos from our day together. The videos are best viewed full-screen. For many more photos, visit our Google Photo album.