It’s something like non-stop creativity at my house. My daughter has a spot in our breakfast room, on the floor, where she pulls out her wares: bits of cloth, paper of various colors and textures, glue, beads, string, egg cartons, boxes we threw in the recycling and hoped would stay there, needles and thread, a stapler, tape, markers, glitter pens, stickers…
At some point I had to make an agreement with her: you can make this colossal mess on the floor, but once a day it needs to be cleaned up. She readily agreed, but she’s even creative about agreements.
My son has largely moved his creativity to the computer, but when he was her age he was always on the floor in the front hall, which we had gated off so that there was one place where our roving preschooler wouldn’t be able to destroy his stuff. Visitors would have to step over block structures, paper folding projects, and scattered natural objects that he brought in from the outside.
One time I heard one of my son’s friends say to him, “You haven’t seen any movies!” That’s not literally true, but in general watching things is not a big hit around our house. Our daughter will do it as much as we’ll let her, but inspiration doesn’t come from a glowing box. We get inspired by doing things. Right now we have a project in progress for year-end teacher gifts, cannelini beans sprouting in peat cups, and an electronics project my husband is doing to create laser communicators. I am working on making a video of my daughter’s school play, and our son has created a blog of software reviews. In other words, we’re very, very busy and haven’t gotten to half of the things we really want to be doing!
And along comes the Maker Faire. To learn a bit about it, you can visit my last year’s blog entry about it. The Maker Faire is to people like us like Cannes is to movie buffs. It’s the real deal, and it happens in San Mateo. If you’re a watcher, you can go and watch all the amazing things that people have made. If you’re a shopper, you can buy both kits and pre-made items. If you’re a doer, you can go straight to the room where you get to create oddities out of surplus everything.
I really can’t recommend a more inspirational day for your little inventors than this one. At $50 for a family entry, it’s gotten a bit more pricey. But it’s hard to put a price on an experience like this. $50 is about what you’d have to pay these days to take your family to a movie, too, and I can assure you, they’ll get a lot more from the Maker Faire. And they’ll probably be able to watch some videos there, too.
The Maker Faire is a mind-boggling assortment of wild, weird, and wonderful. We always come home totally exhausted and recharged for another year of messing, mixing, melting, and fun!
