Monday, May 15, 2006

Making Tools Fun














As most puppet builders know, the need for a good hair dryer is essential when working with contact cement. But I needed to keep it fun when using this tool. As a result, I ended up adding a little spice to my hairdryer. Yep it is The Big Bad Wolf of hair dryers.

The truth is that I used the hair dryer in a science lesson (over a year ago) about building structures for my grade 1 students. We had read the story of The Three Little Pigs and the students were challenged to build a structure that would stand up to the power of "The Big Bad Wolf".



The lessons concluded with a final test to see who's houses stood up. It was amazing fun to see this wolf blow some of the straw houses right off the table. The stick houses stayed up for a little but fell over. It was the little houses built with stones and glue that stayed up no problem.




Now my wolf helps me with drying the contact cement I use for building my puppets. It is amazing what you can come up with when you have a need.




By the way, this hair dryer can be fully disassembled and has no fabric or materials covering any areas that could cause overheating.