The White Board
The White Board
The idea for the Bringing Up Innovators blog began with the $20 purchase of a giant dry-erase white board. For the past few months we had been transitioning our basement office into a room where the boys could play and use the computer. As I was organizing the basement I came across all sorts of cool toys they’d never used, mostly because they’d been pushed behind other things or landed on the bottoms of piles.
One morning I wandered down an office supply aisle at Costco. The magnetic white board jumped out at me, and the idea to transform the basement into a Makerspace crystallized. I’d been thinking about how to make the room more functional, and how to make it a space where the boys could relax and hang out while they took turns on the desk top computer. They had taken a computer coding course over the summer, which motivated them to build projects in Scratch and introduced them to Minecraft (something we’d managed to avoid until now). Finding the white board was my ah-ha moment. I would put it in the basement, and they could use it to plan out their projects and inventions and whatever else struck them.
A few days later I brought them to Costco to see what they thought. Bulldog’s face lit up, his mind working faster than his mouth could keep up with the potential uses. Fury agreed. This was something they needed.
We brought the white board home, and then got lost in our crazy weekend activities. Monday morning I pulled the plastic off and propped it up on the futon. I couldn’t leave it blank, though. I wrote:
Hi, Boys!
I hope you had a great day at school. Once your homework is done, please try to spend at least 15 minutes on Scratch each.
Quote for the Day:
If you can dream it, you can do it!
-Walt Disney
Love,
Mom
After school they had their snacks, did their homework, and disappeared into the basement. I heard giggling, then silence. I went down and found CEO on the computer logged in to Scratch, and Bulldog drawing away on the white board. They’d crossed out Walt Disney change it to Universal Studios, started a World War II battle scene, and drawn big hearts around Mom and written “Mom is the BEST!” with lots of smiley faces.
And that’s how it began. The Quote of the Day is now a thing, where I write them a note while they’re in school and end with a quote. They get mad if I forget, or if I use the same quote twice. They like to edit my messages to suit them, and comment on the quotes. But the best part is they’re drawing, and writing. I don’t know what it is about a giant white board, but it is infinitely more inspiring for them than a blank piece of paper.
