Scrap wood Planes, Cars and Boats

At Tinkering for the past few months, the students have been learning about different types of vehicles. To expand on this subject, they would get the chance to create either a plane, car or boat from scrap wood. Besides learning about vehicles, this project also taught them about the different tools used to make the wood art.Miss Stacie pre-cut all the pieces for each project with a jig saw. Then she had each student sand each of their wood piece to make it smooth. The children took away all the “scratchies”, which could give us splinters. For some of the children this was the difficult step. Holding the wood while sanding may be easy for adults but little hands and short attention spans, made this step longer than anticipated. Others were expert sanders and wanted to move quickly to the next step. We used small foam or woodblock sanders, mostly scrap wood and some new pine wood trim as well.Next step: we had to put our project together. We used glue, wood screws and screwdrivers. The children learned that there are different types of screwdrivers for the different kinds of screws. They used Philips head screws and some star shaped wood screws. We had different types of screws depending on the depth of the wood.
This step helped the children with their fine motor skills and with hand strengthening.The final and I believe the favorite step for most of the kiddos was the decoration of their project. The children painted and some glittered their projects. Glitter was everywhere.The children who decided to create a car have to add their wheels to the body they had sanded. They got handy with the hammer for this step. Miss Stacie had some axels cut for them and they hammered the wheels on.The children who created the boat had to also create the sail. Miss Stacie cut sails from fabric samples and some from felt. The children then glued shapes and the initial of their first name to the sail. Once again, glue was everywhere. Learning how to use glue is always a big fun fine motor mess but what’s tinkering without a little creative mess, boring!!