This week we got to play around with a cool new (to me) building set – Makedo!
To quote the website, Makedo “is a series of safe cardboard construction tools purposely designed for kids to imagine and build the world they want to see.”
My library has a centralized set of blue screws, yellow connector pieces, and grey screw drivers, and each location provides their own cardboard for building, usually salvaged from the recycle.
The creative possibilities are pretty expansive – kids can make buildings and structures, vehicles, animals, whatever else they can imagine! We added in some coloring supplies, too, so kids could decorate their creations for even more fun.
Because the kids in my program attend without their grownups, and manipulating the cardboard and making holes for the plastic screws can be fiddly, I pre-cut the cardboard into smaller squares and rectangles, and used a three-hole punch to make a series of holes in each piece. This made it a lot easier for kids to get the screws started, and avoided a lot of potential frustration!
We then used the cardboard pieces as body parts to make our own puppets, using the screws as joints to make movable limbs! If kids wanted pieces with a specific size or shape, I cut the cardboard for them using sharp scissors – definitely a job for a grownup.
Just look at this amazing dragon, complete with fiery wings and a tongue! Kids made snakes, an airplane, a pig with a curly tail, a long-neck dinosaur, and several dancing robots.
I love open-ended creative projects that lets kid muck about, experiment and try new things, and this was definitely a lot of fun! It is fiddly, though – making holes in the cardboard for the plastic screws is not easy for little fingers, so punching holes ahead of time is highly recommended. Makedo also sells small plastic saws for cutting cardboard, but we found them to be pretty difficult for the kids to use, so pre-cutting cardboard and having scissors available for older kids or adults to use is also a good idea to make the actual building process run more smoothly.
Oh, and last but not least – make sure you repeatedly explain to participants that they will have to deconstruct their creations at the end of the program! I repeated this several times throughout the hour, and still had some tears and reluctance when it was time to take the puppets apart. I try to mitigate this a bit by taking photos of the creations, which I printed out and put on display in my branch for children to show off to their family and friends.
Obviously I’m not sponsored by Makedo in any way, shape or form, but if they want to send me some more pieces to play with, I wouldn’t complain, ha ha!