"But the oven needs turny things"

This morning, as the children were playing in our kitchen space, ES said, "but the oven needs turny things." When asked what she meant she said, "we can't cook the cookies if we can't turn it on."

So a small group of children went to work thinking through the idea of adding knobs to the front of our oven! First we talked about the shape of the knobs, where the knobs should be placed, and how our ovens at home look.

Some thoughts:

"My oven has round knobs."

"Mine too!"

"I think I have four."

"Mine has some numbers by it."

"You have to turn it so it comes on."

We then drew pictures of what we would want our oven to look like:

We wondered, "how big should the knobs be?"

We decided to show our answers with our hands!

We then looked at some of our loose parts to see if they would be the right answer for our oven knob problem!

"We need round ones."

"They can't be too small."

"We need the perfect size."

We chose the small black tubes with the green round pieces to go on top to turn.

The kids wanted to make holes and asked for tools.

They went to work using screwdrivers to make the holes in the cardboard!

And then we tried taping the green piece onto the black piece and then pushing the black piece into the little holes that we made.

We realized that the knobs wouldn't turn and the tape wasn't holding the black and green pieces together so we had to rethink our plan. Eventually we decided to try glue!