Every year around the holidays, both Thanksgiving and Christmas, the museum (The Franklin Institute) opens up the space typically used as classrooms for some extra programming. Which programming would that be? Giant Tinkertoys!
It started out as just Giant Tinkertoys, but now we also bring out Imagination Playground and Keva Planks to make three sections of what has been dubbed Creation Station. Visitors to the museum love it. Members come despite the crowds these weeks because of it. All of them wish it was available regularly.
So we put out these Giant Tinkertoys and the only rules set forth for the visitors are: share, be careful when building... and most important, clean up what you play with. Simple and precise. Most of the visitors have no problem following those rules. In fact, a vast majority of the parents are happy when they come in and we tell the kids the rule about cleaning up when they are done. They turn to us with a smile and say "those are the same rules we have at home!" Of course we still get some stinkers who hoard extra pieces, build gigantic structures, make a mess and then at their parent's urging, simply walk out. So we have to step in and restore order, enforce sharing and of course, disassemble and put away the pieces. It keeps us busy.
Generally the things that kids build have little resemblance to what they identify it as when their imagination runs away from anything our minds can visualize, but they're having fun and so you just nod your head and smile. Then there are the meathead kids whose imaginations only take them as far as putting a wheel on both ends of a long rod and pretending to lift a weight. It all gets very repetitive when you're working as the supervisor in the room. But sometimes, every once in a while, kids (or kids and their parents) will get really creative and build something we've never seen before.
Today (err, yesterday, because I'm posting this late) one of the volunteers came over and tells me the group in one corner is building a giraffe. At the time, it resembled nothing of the sort and I responded with, "Sure. I'll reserve final critique until they're finished, but currently that looks nothing like a giraffe." So we continued with the afternoon, asking what people were building and picking up pieces. It was right after they attached the head, I turned around and said "Holy cow! It's a giraffe!" We started laughing with the two ladies and the 10 year old girl that were working on it. They weren't done yet, but it certainly was a giraffe. By the end, they had even built a tree to help support the head of the giraffe so that it wasn't eternally drinking water... and so that the giraffe could have some "leaves" to eat. (Completely irrelevant, but these ladies made sure to take apart and put away what they had played with before departing, because... that was the rule they were told when they entered the space.)
Imagination isn't just for small children.
Here's a picture of their final construction:
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