No One Has Ever Pulled Themselves Up By Their Own Bootstraps

Some 30 years ago my wife and I considered ourselves the kind of people who would have a wine cellar. We were motivated in no small part by the fact that we'd just purchased a home with your classic cool, dark basement, ignoring the fact that I don't drink wine and she sticks almost exclusively to a few brands of chardonnay. Since there were already shelves built into the space, I ran out and purchased a classic Ikea do-it-yourself "system," which we filled, over years, with bottles of wine people gave us as gifts and that we would likely never drink.

Fortunately, I work in a profession in which nothing need ever go to waste, so when we moved out of that house, the wine rack parts found their way to the preschool where they served as a building set.

The system is simple: hexagonal prisms that are about a foot long with each end drilled with four holes into which wooden pegs fit. They can be inserted by hand, but we like to use rubber mallets at the work bench. 

It's an imperfect system, especially when using the mallets. If you hit too hard, your entire structure might collapse like a house of cards. The same goes for if you don't brace the whole thing against the work bench, which makes it a perfect thing for tinkering around, especially with an adult there to lend a hand. This can be a frustrating system to work with, I know, I've cobbled them together before and repaired them frequently over the years. Few preschool-aged children are able to manage it without an adult hand here or there. In fact, I've come to realize that it's the kind of challenge that is almost rigged for young children to fail unless they have a helping hand.

I'm reminded of a piece by the author Alfie Kohn about the popular myth that children today are too coddled and that they "benefit from plenty of bracing experiences with frustration and failure." 

Research certainly doesn't support the idea that failure or disappointment is constructive in itself. A "BGUTI" (better get used to it) rationale -- the assumption that children are best prepared for unpleasant experiences that may come later by being exposed to a lot of unpleasantness while they're young -- makes no sense from a psychological perspective. We may want kids to rebound from failure, but that doesn't mean it's usually going to happen -- or that the experience of failure makes that desired outcome more likely . . . In fact, studies find that when kids fail, they tend to construct an image of themselves as incompetent and even helpless, which leads to more failure. (They also come to prefer easier tasks and lose interest in whatever they're doing.)

When children come to our workbench, indeed when they freely chose to approach any activity in our school, the emphasis is on "tinkering," not success or failure, not reward (good grade) or punishment (bad grade), not product but process. When a child is challenged by the process of fitting two pieces together, the adult's role isn't to keep their "eye on the prize," but rather to "notice" or narrate the process in which the child is engaging. The goal of struggle is not to overcome, but to gather data.

As pioneering psychologist Jerome Bruner put it, "We want students to "experience success and failure not as a reward and punishment but as information."

Most children get to a point when working with this impromptu building set where they need help to do what they want, an extra hand to hold something; a few words of strategic counsel. This isn't, of course, an invitation for the adult to take over, nor a sign of having been coddled, but rather a natural human response to a situation that is too many or too much for them. When a child asks for help with this building set, it's a request to provide support for their exploration. Often the request for help is very clear and specific, "Will you hold this for me?" an acknowledgment that they know exactly what they need to get to where they wants to go. Other times it's less clear, perhaps a groan of frustration or an "I can't do it!" In this case, we engage in a discussion about the nature of the challenge, my "help" coming in the form of helping the child simply formulate their request for help. Often that alone allows a child to see his way through to a solution. Sometimes I find I need to make suggestions (e.g., "If someone held that part, you might be able to do it.") or simply make statements of fact (e.g., "If you hit right here, the peg will go in the hole.")  

I have no formula to guide adults on when and how to provide help. It always comes down to the child, the situation, and your relationship with them. Sometimes, as my friend and parent educator Janet Lansbury suggests, it's totally appropriate to say, "I won't help you, but I won't let you get hurt," but learning how to ask for help, learning to know when to ask for help, is as vital to "success" (however you define it) as anything else one needs to learn.

Part of what Kohn is writing about in his piece is what I call "The Myth of Boot Straps." It's a common theme that runs throughout public debate these days, one that implies that everyone can just pull themselves up by their own boot straps if only they apply themselves, stick to it, work harder. It's part of the mythology of the "self made man"; that it's a sign of weakness or coddling to ask for help.

What people have forgotten in this neo-Calvinist ideology is that "to pull one's self up by one's bootstraps" is a metaphor for an impossible task. It's an absurdity. Everyone needs help. If you're stuck in the mud, no amount of pulling at your own bootstraps is going to get you out. Learning when and how to ask for help is a vital life skill, because mythology aside, no one does it on his own.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Brute Fact

On a regular cycle, the moon in various phases is visible in the morning. Each day, when I observe it upon waking, it is in a different place, then traces an arc across the sky until it disappears behind the horizon in the west.

It has been doing this for billions of years. Fungi, the first multicellular lifeforms began tracking lunar cycles, even synchronizing with them. Later, when plants began to populate the globe, they too took notice. And then, last of all, came we animals. When I take note of the morning moon for several days running, I feel myself connected to those earliest humans who wondered about the same moon, as it did the same things it does today. I imagine that I might have been one of those early humans who began keep some sort of record of its progress over days and years, perhaps using some sort of system of tally marks etched into limestone or something.

Living in today's world, I don't have that urge. I know the moon moves, in a dance with the Earth, according to a predictable cycle, one that can be predicted centuries in advance, but the calculations have already been done. If I really need or want to know how the moon will appear next Wednesday, it will only take a few seconds on the internet to have an answer. 

There is no more need to wonder about the moon: that wonder has been replaced by "brute fact."

I came across that phrase the other day -- "brute fact" -- when reading about the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. I like it. It gets at something that has long disturbed me about the way most schools approach education. I often refer to it here on the blog as an obsession with right and wrong answers. In Douglas Adams book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a massive computer is built for the explicit purpose of determining "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." After seven million years it spits out the "brute fact" that the answer is 42.

While 42 may indeed be the correct answer, it is not only meaningless without a full understanding of both its relationship to everything else, but even as a so-called "fact" it is shaped by the perspective of the observers . . . In this case the computer.

When we make the mistake of thinking that brute fact alone makes for an adequate education, we remove wonder, which is the source of the human motivation to learn anything at all. It really shouldn't surprise us that so many children are unmotivated by school, and it's why our school masters must then introduce the hollow external motivators of grades and test scores: replacing the sweet carrot with a harsh stick.

When we wonder, we play, which is the highest form of research. It's through play that we are free to examine the brute fact from every perspective available to us, and to at least hope to discover how it connects to ourselves and the rest of the world. This is where meaning comes from, not brute fact alone.

When I see the morning moon, the joy it brings me goes far beyond the brute fact of its predictability. It connects me, through wonder, through time, to everything that has ever existed on this planet, which itself is a vast system of connection. The brute fact may be 42, but this morning as I consider the moon, I'm brought closer to the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

Let's not rush our youngest children on to the brute fact. It will always be there as predictably as the phases of the moon. Let's let them play, at least for a few years, because that's the only way any of us have ever discovered meaning. And meaning is what we need most.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

To Live With Our Heads on a Pivot

I recently returned from Calgary where I took part in the Alberta Family Child Care Association's annual conference. I came back inspired by the conference, but with a pressing question for my fellow humans: what did people do at airports before smartphones? 

It seemed that everyone, from young children to elderly adults, were jabbing and swiping, and engaging with the same crap they could have been engaging with without getting out of bed.

Here we all were, travelers together in the midst of doing something that should by all rights be exciting. We were traveling, by air, to new places, new climates, new cultures and countries. Or perhaps returning home from the same. In a sane world, in a world that had not lost its ability to wonder, our heads would be on pivots, watching people, admiring the modern architecture, taking in the public art, listening to the unique sounds and reacting to the unique scents of transit, watching with awe as 70 ton machines soar into space carrying people to all points of the globe. 

Once you've cleared airport security, you emerge to find yourself in a place that is no place at all. A place governed by schedules, but where morning, noon, and night have no meaning; a place of 6 am cocktails and 10 pm coffee. When you raise your head from your screen you find yourself at a truly exotic crossroads, where people from all over the world have converged, to bide their time, while passing through.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recently made changes to their long-standing recommendation that children be screen-free during their first two years of life. They still urge minimal screen time during the first 18 months, with the exception of video chatting with family members. After that, up to five years old, the recommendation is for no more than one hour per day of "high-quality" content. Co-viewing (i.e., caregivers participating with the child) is strongly encouraged, especially up to two years old. And all of this with the caveat that screen time not replace play, sleep, movement, or social interaction.

And that's exactly what I saw happening: dull, commonplace, repetitive screen time was replacing all those things that make travel and life dynamic, spicy, and exciting. And it wasn't just the kids. We blame and pity the children, but this is a something that impacts all of us and not just when we travel. The phones come out at dinner, at the theater, while walking down the street. Every time we look at our screens it is replacing something else. And that something else is wonder.

In my lifetime, "the screen" has gone from being a black and white TV set that offered relatively little of interest to young children outside of Saturday morning cartoons to a 24/7 ubiquitous presence. Even checking my clock involves a screen. This is the world in which our children are living. That said, it's important to note that the world's oldest and largest association of pediatricians continues to caution against screens for young children. 

But we would be well served to consider it a caution to all of us.

The truth is that our screens, as convenient, useful and entertaining as they are, can have a net negative impact on everyone's physical and mental health. You can hardly scroll a social media feed (on a screen, of course) without coming across dire warnings about what our screens are doing to us. Some of it is hyperbolic fear-mongering, but a lot of it is real. I think we all know that our screens are harming us, if only because they replace life itself, but few of us are able or willing to give them up. Indeed, I doubt many of us would be able to limit ourselves to that one hour per day, especially if it involves having to "co-view" with someone else . . . But, you know, when I do the mental experiment, I can see that it would completely transform the experience.

According to the World Health Organization nearly 80 percent of teenagers around the world do not get enough physical exercise. A new longitudinal study finds that the seeds of this phenomenon are sown during the preschool years. According to this study, active play, limited screen time, and sufficient sleep in the early years predict a more active lifestyle a decade later. We know that our bodies and minds are intertwined, that an inactive body dulls the mind. This study doesn't tell us anything we probably don't already know, but it does provide more concrete support for the AAP's screen time recommendations

Young children need us to adhere to the AAP's guidelines, but the truth is that it will never happen until we adults do something similar, which is to say, take conscious control of our screen habits. I hope I don't come off as preachy, I grab for my phone far too often, but for the past couple years, I've made a point of leaving my phone behind more and more often. As I traveled to and from Calgary, I had my boarding passes on my screen device and I used it for necessary communications, but made myself keep my head on a pivot, observing my surroundings, the people, the technology, the wonder of a crossroads. 

It was easier when I was young. The TV was alluring, especially when we finally got our "in living color" set, but when Mom wanted us out of her hair, she could just say, "You're driving me crazy, go outside." And we did, where we found things to wonder about. Increasingly, parents don't have that option. I get it when they say, "I just needed a moment to myself," as an explanation for their child's screen time. Despite a culture that often tells us the opposite, being a parent ought not be a full time job. Our children do not need full time, round-the-clock supervision and entertainment. Indeed, they need more freedom and fewer screens if they are to grow into independent, resourceful, competent, and confident adults.

Our parents had "go outside." A fenced backyard is nice to have, but the truth is that a walled garden, no matter how wonderful, isn't quite the same thing . . . Unless they are free to climb, to dig, to harvest, and to hunt. And, honestly, few of us are willing to sacrifice our landscaping to the kind of play children really need. Besides, and this is a more than just a philosophical point, fences are like walls and screens in that they create a world without visible horizons, that promise of something more, something beyond, something unknown. Screens offer us a hint of that, only to disappoint with yet another damned influencer video, but it's the desire for horizons that keep us swiping and jabbing.

As an early childhood educator, my purpose has always been to do everything in my power to make our school into that alternative to screens, to indoors, to constant supervision. It might sound contradictory. After all, our conception of schools is to confine and control, but in everything I do, I want children to know that they have explicit permission when in my care to climb, dig, harvest, and hunt; permission to explore the stories, objects, and ideas about which they have questions. I want them to know, that I'm not there to tell or teach, but rather to be of adequate service to their safety, to answer their questions honestly, and to provide them with the things they need. And a big part of making that happen is to ensure, to the degree possible, that it is a place without screens.

I admire the AAP and their commitment to early childhood. Their recently reaffirmed and updated clinical report on The Power of Play is the most comprehensive collection of research and data on why young children must play that I've ever come across. We ignore their screen time recommendations at our own (and our children's) risk.

We know that our knee-jerk screen habits are harming us in a variety of ways, but for me, the most tragic part is that screens have replaced our wonder with a pathetic existence of swiping and jabbing. We have evolved to live with our heads on pivots, our bodies in motion, not inertly bent to a screen. We have evolved to play, sleep, move, and socialize. And that is exactly what our screens are taking from us.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Learning While the Adults Loiter With Intent

I don't know where the pogo sticks came from, but there were two on the playground. I imagine that we benefited from someone's garage or cellar purge. When I first spied them, I tried one out, something I've done a handful of times in my life. I didn't succeed in achieving a single bounce, although there have been times in my life when I've managed as many as a half dozen. I wondered if the children would know what they are, but one of the cardinal rules of young children in groups is that if one child knows something, they all know it. So all it took was for one child to say, "It's a pogo stick," then explain how they had seen one work and the knowledge went viral.

The One Laptop Per Child organization demonstrated this phenomenon back in 2012 when they left boxes of tablet computers in remote Ethopian villages. Within four minutes, illiterate children had figured out, together, how to power them up. Within days, they were customizing their desktops. Within weeks, they were using the installed apps and singing along to videos. Within five months, they were hacking the Android software. All without instructions or teachers. This is how learning through play works and why few things impede learning more than the "keep your eyes on your own work" mentality: it makes children dependent upon the adults rather than one another which is the most natural and motivating way to learn new things.

Pogo sticks may or may not be more complex things to learn than those tablets, or maybe there are just more distractions on our playground in Seattle than in an Ethiopian village, but after weeks, the kids, despite understanding the concept, still had not succeeded in even a single bounce. That is until one day when a couple girls decided they were going to figure it out. They knew they couldn't get started bouncing on their own, so they tried working together, with one holding the pogo stick upright for the other, but the weight was too much. They tried leaning the pogo stick against the wall of the playhouse to keep it upright as they climbed on, but this too failed. They tried rallying more children to help hold it upright, but then it was too crowded for anyone to climb on. They considered the mental experiment of digging a hole into which the pogo stick could be "planted," but recognized that it would be impossible to bounce properly in a hole.

"Maybe you could use this," suggested a boy, offering a length of rope. After considering it, the girls decided it was worth a try. I couldn't imagine how they would manage it, but that's not my job, so I moved along to loiter with intent elsewhere. When I later returned to the pogo stick experiments, they had tied one end of the rope to the top of the playhouse and another around the trunk of a lilac at the top of our concrete slide, with the pogo stick dangling, upright, in the middle. As one girl steadied the rope, another climbed onto the pogo stick and, Yes! She bounced four or five times before toppling over. 

By the end of the day, several of the children had discovered pogo stick success, using this training device invented by children. It's incredible hubris for adults to assume that children need us to teach them things. What they need most from us is freedom, time, and other children with whom to collaborate while the adults loiter with intent.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

The Blind Spot

"(M)athematical physical laws don’t describe reality; they describe idealized objects in models." Nancy Cartwright

I've just finished reading a book called The Blind Spot, in which it's three authors (Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson) explore what they call the "blind spot" of Western science. They start with what they call "The Parable of Temperature."

To paraphrase, scientists invented the thermometer (in the absence of any established theory of temperature) in order to measure this thing called temperature. Of course, long before any thought to measure temperature, everyone already understood the concept of hot and cold. The problem is that hot and cold have meanings that change depending on the individual and the circumstances, but temperature, as measured by a thermometer, is supposedly an exact thing.

This is what scientists felt they needed in order to make progress toward a better understanding about the way the world works. The problem is that a thermometer isn’t the kind of precise tool we've been conditioned to believe it is. Thermometers measure temperature on a scale that is based on the boiling and freezing points of water, and those things vary depending on where the measurements are taken. For example, on a mountain top, water boils at a lower temperature than at sea level. Indeed, it also boils at a different temperature at every elevation in between. 

To work around this challenge, scientists then created controlled environments in which to perform their experiments, laboratories or workshops that offered consistent, replicable conditions which allowed them to develop an abstract theory called classical thermodynamics. They then used this theory – like "pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps" – to define temperature even more abstractly. Now, temperature could be defined in a way that excluded concepts like hot and cold altogether and even allowed for things that are physically impossible, like the idea of “absolute zero" and the mathematical possibility that something could spontaneously reheat itself.

And lost in all of this is the concrete, real, human experience of temperature that each of us feel with our own bodies. This "scientific process" leads scientists to tell us that there is an objective reality that is somehow separate from us. To use another example, we're told that things we have never directly experienced like atoms and light waves are real, while things we experience all the time, like the color red or hot and cold are "just in your head."

It's as if scientists believe that our heads are not part of the world.

We do this all the time in education, especially when it comes to math and science, and that's probably because we are all victims of this Western penchant for abstracting basic concepts in order to study them, then making the mistake of reifying (or thing-ifying) our formulas and controlled environments. Every child engages in mathematics for fun, which is what they are doing when they sort, sequence, and make patterns: that is what math is, concretely. But instead, probably because most of us have learned that our own actual experience with math is inadequate, we rush to force young children to replace this joyful, human activity of sorting, sequencing, and patterning, with the abstractions of numbers and equations. When we do this, we remove it a step away from real, human experience, experience we need in order to make meaning of the abstractions. In doing so, we teach them that their own experience of mathematics is "just in their head" while the abstractions of number, operators, and equations is "real."

The symbol "2" is not a real thing. It is an abstraction of the concrete circumstance of having, say, collected a number of apples greater than one or less than three. The symbol 1/2 is likewise not real. Reality is cutting an apple in half to share with another person. The same thing can be said of most science that tends to thing-ify real world phenomenon by separating them from our actual experience of the world. When we rush to make children read, we do the same thing, forcing them into the abstractions of letters and sentences and paragraphs, while ignoring the real, concrete things, like stories, characters, and ideas, that are the only source of their meaning.

Too often in education, as in science, we rush to the abstractions, mistaking them for something real, when, in fact, it will always be the embodied knowledge of hot and cold that matters most. The color red, the story of adventure, the sharing of an apple, those are the real, concrete things that must be embodied if the rest of it is going to have any meaning at all. And meaning is what is most missing from our world today.

We do not prepare children for life by feeding them abstractions and telling them to ignore what their senses tell them. We do it by setting them free to take the real world in their hands which is the only way it will ever have meaning in their heads and hearts. And this happens when we give them permission to play.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

When I Brought Slot Cars to the Preschool

I was probably 8 years old when I awoke on Christmas morning to discover that Santa had left my brother and me a slot car set.

We hadn't asked for slot cars. I suspect that this was something that Dad really wanted to give to us. I mean, it was the height of the slot car trend in America and this was exactly the kind of toy with which an engineer would want to play. We played with it alongside Dad for a good part of that morning. Since we were then allowed to keep it in the dining room for several days after that, we returned to it repeatedly during the next week.

We learned how to slot our cars onto the tracks. Dad showed us how to properly bend the copper braids (he called them brushes) that created contact with the metal track, making the cars go. There was a red car and a white car. We thought one was a little faster than the other, but our testing was inconclusive. By the end of the week, the track was packed away and put in our bedroom closet where it mostly sat untouched.

As often happens with manufactured toys, even cool ones like a slot car set, the play value wore off quickly. After all, how many times can you drive your car round and round doing nothing but squeezing a little trigger? We had better, more active things to be doing.

A couple years later, our family moved to Athens, Greece for Dad's work. We were only going to be there for two years (as it turned out it was four years), so we didn't take much of our stuff and the slot car track was left behind. Shortly after we arrived, however, Dad came home from work with another slot car set. But this one was far, far better. It was second-hand for one thing and included not only several cars, but a whole case full of car parts, including motors, tires, chassis, car bodies, wires, screws, braids, and everything kids might need to modify and build their own custom cars. There were no instructions, although there were several small screwdrivers and a couple of operational cars that provided us with the "blueprint" for how the parts went together. It wasn't just a slot car set, but rather a race car themed tinkering set.

I played with it far more than I'd played with that original set, not necessarily for racing, but for building and rebuilding functioning slot cars. I would spend hours noodling over how to combine a particular motor with a certain chassis, wheels, and body. I might run it around the track a few times, then it was on to the next. The scripts had been stripped from the toy, rendering it more open-ended, and capable to evoking the emotion that I call, "I wonder . . ."

We passed that set along to other kids when we moved back to the States, but it all came back to me one day several years ago when I came across a slot car set in a big-box toy store. At only $9.99 it seemed like a deal, so I picked one up to bring into the preschool. I knew that the kids were probably too young to build their own cars, but it seemed like exactly the kind of toy that would engage preschoolers for a day or two, maybe a week. 

Not only did it have zoom-zoom appeal, but I knew from experience that playing with slot cars demanded just the right level of fiddling around to keep them interesting: you had to position them correctly into the track slots; the braids, of course, needed constant adjusting; if you went too fast, the cars wouldn't make it around the track; there were several electrical connection points that would need managing; the track itself was a challenge to assemble and re-arrange. The idea of racing cars would draw them in, but I figured the fiddling around would keep them coming back.

For the next decade, that slot car track made two, maybe three, annual appearances in our classroom, each lasting a week before it was once more packed away. That's about as long as most manufactured toys can hold a child's interest. Over years of use, the set became increasingly fiddly to the point that it was almost inoperable. That's the destiny of cheap toys. I kept it going as best I could, but eventually the track would no longer reliably complete the electrical circuit needed to get the cars going -- too many bent parts. Finally, instead of packing or throwing it away, I just let it ride. 

It was fully dismantled over the course of weeks. Over the course of months, the parts mostly migrated to the junkyard playground. And that's where this manufactured toy became everything but a slot car set. It was set free to be loose parts -- wheels, pieces of track, chassis, motors, bodies, hand controllers, guard rails, wires, screws, memories -- that could now become anything at all. Those the children played with for years.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Building Furniture With Preschoolers

Several years ago, we purchased new tables, chairs, and stools for the playground. It all arrived in boxes, unassembled. We could have afforded to purchase the "velvet glove" service which would have meant the stuff arrived ready to go, but where's the learning in that?

Adults often have to hold things in place as the kids tighten the screws. It's a real collaborative process.

I've found that assemble-yourself furniture, such as the stuff you get from places like Ikea, is a sort of "just right" project for our cooperative preschool. Naturally, we can't just turn it over to the kids, but with an adult or two leading these Allen wrench (hex key) assemblies, kids as young as two are capable of making meaningful contributions to these real life projects.

Concentration, cooperation, and fine motor skills are challenged.

It never seems like it's going to work at first. We open the boxes and always find more parts than you think you'll need, and the instructions look daunting, especially since there is often a crowd of kids trying to get their hands on things. 

The first step, however, is a classic preschool sorting project, checking the instructions to make sure you have all the parts, arranging everything by type and shape, comparing the thing you're holding your hand with the graphic on paper, counting out the various screws. These are skills and habits we acquire when we're young that we use throughout our lives.

Once this is accomplished, we know the names of the parts, and naming things always makes projects seem a little more do-able. For instance, the kids and parent-teachers started using the term "lozenges" to label one of the basic pieces required to assemble this brand of furniture. I don't know if that came from the instructions or their own innovative use of language, but it stuck. "I need a lozenge!" "I found a spot for a lozenge!"

We then find Step 1 in the instructions. It's really remarkable how often it's the kids who figure it out first. Then on to Step 2 and Step 3 and Step 4. This isn't for every child, but for some it comes naturally, this kind of real world puzzling.

Here we are fitting a "lozenge" into its proper place.

There's usually an ebb and flow at the workbench as kids take and lose interest. There are always a few who want to see at least one project through from beginning to end, however, puffing their chests in pride when the finished piece is on the ground.

The first piece we finished was this step stool, which we'll also use to replace our old, wobbly benches.

And, of course, once we finish building a piece, we have to take turns putting it through its paces.

Assembling furniture like this is different than much of what we do in our preschool in that it is a project with a predetermined beginning, middle, and end, much like working on puzzles. Over the course of our three days working on this project, at least six different parent-teachers took turns, and I suspect that at one time or another, every child lent a hand. One of the most challenging parts for the adults, however, was in not becoming too product-oriented, too focused on "getting it done." I kept reminding everyone: "It's not a race. If we only get one piece done today, that's fine."

One of the concerns, especially with our wood chip bestrewn outdoor play surface is that with all those little hands, and all those little agendas, we would wind up losing some of the small, but all-important screws. And it was a real concern given that, like with most of these kinds of products, we weren't provided any extras. I was impressed with how seriously the children, even the very youngest, took this responsibility, often clenching them in their fists so securely that their palms were sweating when we finally pried them open.

Real world projects like helping with preparing dinner or working on the car, in which children can make a meaningful (rather than a manufactured) contribution are great for building skills and confidence, of course, but most importantly, I think, it fosters that sense of pride and responsibility, that sense of true belonging that lies at the heart of every great community.

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