How to Turn Your Own Space into a Makerspace
By Liz Holden Boatwright
The evidence is clear that play is good for kids’ emotional, social, and intellectual development. And this is especially true of unstructured play, which is unstructured and free from adult interference. Similarly, engaging in arts and crafts has benefits including motor skills development, inventiveness, and even language improvement. Here at the North Shore Children’s Museum, our Makerspace exhibit is a place where kids can build and be creative – using mostly recycled materials such as paper towel rolls, index cards, and other loose parts. But you don’t need to visit the museum to reap the benefits of a makerspace. Here are some tips for fostering creativity in your own home.
Collect odds and ends
In our makerspace, we provide kids with scraps of paper, pipe cleaners, and other loose art supplies – but no tape or other adhesive. This challenges our young makers to find creative ways to attach their materials using their creative and engineering skills. At home, this is an inexpensive and cost-effective way to stock your kids’ makerspace. Ideas for materials include wrapping paper scraps, toilet paper and paper towel rolls, tissue boxes, old greeting cards, or packing materials.
Bring the outdoors inside
No matter what the season, kids can find a variety of creative materials outdoors. In autumn, fallen leaves can be both a colorful palette and a medium for creativity. At any time of year, rocks can be the start of an art project.
Build a boat
Boatbuilding is a way for kids to combine creative and engineering skills. Using foam, cardboard, or other materials, kids can build boats, testing their buoyancy in a tub full of water, with adult supervision. They can even add sails to catch the breeze from a fan. Once complete, kids can race the boats across the tub or experiment to see how long each boat will stay afloat.
Make a marble run
Explore momentum and movement with a marble run. Kids can use found objects to build ramps, launchers, obstacles and more, to send a marble from one spot to another. For younger kids, this can be as simple as lining up crayons to create a route for the marble to travel across a table, while bigger kids can create longer, more complicated routes.
Form a family band
Explore sound and challenge your child to build instruments. From bucket percussion to elastic strings, the possibilities are endless. And you can even build your own harmonica.
Creativity starts at home, and we hope our museum’s makerspace can provide inspiration for your own. Visit us this fall to explore for yourself.