Fail

In the last two months, I have given four presentations to different groups of early childhood educators.  Whenever I give those talks, people often ask me: How did I start building things for the sensory table?  Sometimes people get right back to me to proudly show me what they built and how the children used it.  Sometimes, though, I hear from someone who has tried to build but for some reason their construction failed.

I started simply so my first bit of advice for anyone who wants to build is to start with simple constructions.  Here are two: a wooden tray and a box tower.

The first construction I ever made was a wooden tray cobbled together with scrap wood from my basement. 

This wooden tray spanned the width of the table and offered the children another level on which to work (see axiom # 3 on the right hand column of this blog).  In this setup, the extra level created a platform/counter above the table for children to put their Moon Sand creations.

Another apparatus that was simple and that I built early on was a box tower.  I simply embedded a vertical box into a wider, base box. 

Not only did this structure offer the children different levels to work on, it provided them with lots of holes for their operations (See axiom #5).  In addition, this construction promoted spacial literacy by creating spaces over, under, around and through (See axiom # 2).

The second bit of advice I would give anyone who wants to build is to embrace failure.  When I give talks, people only see what works.  There were plenty of times a construction did not work as planned.  Sometimes that was OK and sometimes that was not OK.  Usually when something was not OK, there was a design flaw.  Here is a cool looking one---at least from my perspective---that did not work very well.  I called it vertical tubes between boxes.

I connected two boxes using cardboard tubes.  I embedded the tubes in both the boxes.  The bottom box was the base that I taped securely to the bottom of the table.  I wanted to invite the children to pour feed corn down the tubes.  I cut notches in the tubes so the corn would exit the tube on top of the base box, which also give the apparatus an aural component.  So where was the failure?

The failure was in the design.  Because the top box was almost as wide as the width of the table, a lot of the feed corn ended up on the floor.  That was not the children's fault; they were just learning to pour so, of course, they spilled.  They spilled moving the corn from the table up and around the top box and then they spilled when they tried to pour corn down a tube.  As they missed the holes on top, a lot of corn ended up on top creating an invitation for the children to bush the corn off the top---right onto the floor.  Mind you, it was not a failure from the children's perspective, only from my perspective because of the amount of mess.

Interestingly, I usually was able to modify an apparatus soon after I saw what I consider a flaw in the design.  With this particular apparatus, I could not figure out how to modify it so there would not be so-o-o-o-o much spilling.  After a week, I took it down and never made it again.

I still think this was a cool apparatus.  To me it was a small sculpture or model for a piece of architecture.

Here's a question for you.  If you were me, how could you have modified this apparatus to eliminate the design flaw?