If you are wondering how you can stimulate your child’s creative thinking why not try to do a woodworking project with your children. Children enjoy to having fun with tools and make stuff, but many parents don’t have very much confidence in their child being able to work with tools properly.
The biggest inhibition is that many are scared that mishaps may happen.
This is a shame, since it’s really not hard to teach your kids responsibility towards safety in woodworking and materials maintenance.
The only thing that’s really crucial is that the parent should constantly be present and participating in the task. So do not leave a young child alone at the workbench, even though he or she promises not to touch anything while you’re away for a minute.
Hold your horses. If your kid does not strike the nail properly the first time, don’t take the work away from them. Practice and stimulate.
To make sure your child stays focused and keeps away from hazard you have to choose a woodworking task that the kid understands. It needs to be easy, clearly set out and executable in a day, ideally within hours.
The latter is very important as children have a various feeling of time than adults. If a task takes too long, the little one is going to lose interest. You need to always remember that children intend to have fun.
A good method before starting any wood project, is to show your child how to hold a hammer and nail, or how to use a saw correctly. Allow them to experiment with small pieces of wood. Let them know how to make a sword as an example, or a basic plane. Both are cross-shaped, and with some children’s imagination they will turn out to be really cool.
As soon as they learn about wood and the basic tools you can try to move up to the next level.
You can present them to new tools, shapes and plans. But keep it simple. Don’t show them the power tools just because they can hold a hand saw.
Another question is at what age your children can begin woodworking. A safe age is at seven years old, but there’s a lot of children that start earlier than that. Generally, if your child shows genuine passion you can start by providing a small hammer and a nail. If they really enjoy it, you might think about building or buying them a children’s workbench.