When our children come home from school and announce they've a project due, we immediately imagine hours of last-minute adult "adjustments" to get the thing out the door and in on time.  Anything more than poster board or popsicle sticks and the child will need to be saved from his or her own ineptitude...or more properly, lack of development.  Often the projects are simply ill-chosen, and while they might sound good on paper, don't match the skills and knowledge of the child.

There is a wide latitude between the working replica of Edison's first phonograph above and the "mud in Kansas" below.  The difference is what the child can do, and boils down to their level of precision, dexterity, and knowledge.

There is not much precision involved in scribbling with a single colored pencil on a notecard.  But, there is a critical requirement for precision in adjusting the bearing force of the needle on the aluminum strip as the cylinder turns to make "Mary had a little lamb" properly record and playback. 

Achieving the appropriate level of precision is a matter of dexterity and knowledge.  The child has to understand that making something that just looks like the picture in the book is not enough to make it work.  And, that knowledge is useless if the fingers cannot be coordinated sufficiently.

What does a child actually know...about the effects of atmospheric conditions on materials...that cardboard is not that easy to cut straight...that popsicle sticks are pretty strong, but the hot glue that holds them together isn't...even Aba has a hard time cutting two pieces of wood just right so that they go together to form a nice, straight corner.

Selecting a project appropriate to the ability of the child is also a matter of credibility.  The 10-year-old who brings in a science project on the nuances of blood chemistry and whose parent is a hematologist will only provoke knowing smirks from the class.  Even a child of six knows better!

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