Wishlist Wednesday: Tinkerlab

This week's post is by Rachelle at Tinkerlab. Talk about creative! There are so many fun ideas and experiments on her blog that allow children to explore and discover on their own. Head on over and tinker around on this awesome blog!

A Wish for Confidence

Hi, I'm Rachelle and I write about creative experiments for kids over at Tinkerlab. Today I'm here to talk with you about a wish that I have for building childrens' confidence. I spend a lot of time thinking about who I want my daughters to be when they're older (mini-me's, of course...okay, only kidding), and I'm especially interested in raising them to believe in themselves. Young children are full of their own ideas, and I hope that my kids can retain this sense of self as they grow older. Today's post on my blog is Six Tools for Building a Child's Confidence, and I'd like to share three more tools with you here on Cachey Mama.
Trust. Children put an enormous amount of stock into what their parents or teachers think, and its our role to show them that we believe in them. For example, my 3 year old loves loves loves my sewing machine. I don't let her use it unsupervised, but when she does use the machine all I do is help her guide the fabric. She presses the pedal, lifts the foot, and cuts the thread. The same can be said for the electric mixer and cooking at the stove. We don't do these things all the time, but I try to find ways to build these moments of trust into our days together. Iteration. For a child to truly understand how things work, he or she needs to test it out multiple times and in various ways. Think of the child who just learned to write his name and how he'll write it in various sizes, on different kinds of paper, vertically and horizontally, all in an effort to understand the written word and his particular place in the world.. In this example, my daughter frequently paints with liquid watercolors and wanted to test how blowing paint through two different straws could create different effects. Tinkering. Pulling things apart to undertand how they work helps children grasp the bigger picture of the world around them. We had an old monitor that was scheduled for a trip to the dump, and decided to pull it apart (carefully) so that my daughter could get a close look at some circuit boards and wires that live behind the computer. Another way to go about this is to give children some small tools and an old clock, and a fair amount of time to take it all apart.

What do you think helps build a child's sense of confidence?

Thanks for inviting me to share with you today, Lori. It's such a pleasure!