Tinkering Time: 30 Creative Classroom Projects for Young Engineers, Artists, and Inventors - Softcover

Baggett, Alice

9781955604284: Tinkering Time: 30 Creative Classroom Projects for Young Engineers, Artists, and Inventors

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1955604282 ISBN 13: 9781955604284

Publisher: Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, 2026

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From the publishers of Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom. Tinkering Time: 30 Creative Classroom Projects for Young Engineers, Artists, and Inventors is a practical, joy-filled guide to bringing hands-on tinkering into preschool and PreK-K classrooms.

Young children are natural tinkerers. Give them interesting materials, a good question, and room to experiment—and watch what happens.

Tinkering Time offers 30 classroom-tested STEM/STEAM projects for preschool and PreK students, illustrated throughout with full-color photos from real classrooms. From building bridges and imaginary animals to wind tunnels, simple machines, magnets, and more, these open-ended challenges invite children to make, test, modify, and try again.

You'll find helpful ideas, playful hands-on learning activities, and all the inspiration you need to spark curiosity and confidence in every child.

INSIDE YOU'LL FIND:

30 hands-on maker education projects, richly illustrated in full color
Open-ended STEM challenges with multiple pathways
Practical guidance for designing classroom tinkering experiences
Ideas for materials, classroom setup, scaffolding, and family communication

BECAUSE TINKERING ISN'T ABOUT MAKING THE "RIGHT" THING. IT'S ABOUT DISCOVERING WHAT YOU CAN DO.

ALICE BAGGETT is a veteran educator with more than three decades of experience teaching young children. Her passions are tinkering, problem solving, and creating hands-on experiences that help children think, wonder, and build their ideas. She is the author of The Invent to Learn Guide to Making in the K-3 Classroom: Why, How, and WOW!

Praise for Tinkering Time

Tinkering Time uses concrete examples and explanations to introduce young makers (and their facilitators) to the wonderful, whimsical world of bricolage — working with materials that are familiar and comfortable to work with — to unleash their imaginations, explore tinkering and engineering, and gain maker fluency. With a mind toward sustainability and accessibility, these thirty engaging projects will keep your classroom, makerspace, or home busy crafting and building skills.
—Josh Burker, makerspace teacher and author of The Invent to Learn Guide to Fun, and The Invent to Learn Guide to MORE Fun!

Tinkering Time: 30 Creative Classroom Projects for Young Engineers, Artists, and Inventors is a great resource for anyone working in ECE and needing support to justify why inquiry through play is important in the learning journey. Any paragraph from the introduction can be used at a faculty meeting or with administrators to start a conversation about the why behind the importance of these activity opportunities. If you feel like it is a battle to justify a constructionist approach in your learning environment, Alice Baggett's book is a necessary arrow to keep in your quiver! Support for the things you believe in AND inspiration of new ideas and extensions for when you think you have tried everything already.
—Amy Turino, PhD, Elementary Design Technology, Korea International School Jeju

Tinkering Time gives teachers the language to describe the skills and developments associated with tinkering and the Tinkerer’s habits of mind. This text bridges the distance between the administrators curriculum spreadsheets and the teacher’s joyful learning space, it does the work of describing progressions of skills and benchmarks that outsiders to the classroom need to see to understand the learning. The experiences described provide a wide range of skill building discoveries- and even provide the language needed to help parents support and understand the students’ learning.
— Sam Patterson, Makerspace Teacher, Echo Horizon School

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About the Author

Alice Baggett has been an educator for over three decades, with a B.A. in Archaeology from Oberlin College and a master's degree in education from Florida International University. She began her career as a Teach for America corps member in New Orleans and has focused ever since on tinkering and hands-on problem-solving in the classroom. She is the author of The Invent to Learn Guide to Making in the K-3 Classroom: Why, How, and WOW.

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