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Our home is a serene, tranquil oasis. Neatly organised, it efficiently facilitates the calm structured learning of our emotionally stable, completely rational and neverendingly cooperative children.
NAAAHT!
The idillic vision of a spotless, Marie Kondo’d home is completely at odds with the reality of a fun and creative learning environment for our young home educated children. Our teeny tornados excitedly tear through the house in a loud colourful blur of chaos and creativity. The eye of their little storm is the kitchen. It’s the natural epicentre of their self-directed home education.
In a short series of posts, we’ll detail the wonderful, wacky, brilliant and downright bonkers things that happen in our kitchen. Hopefully, you’ll take away some fun ideas of how you and your kids can make the most of your home laboratory. We’ll start with where, the magic really happens…
The tuff tray
We say “tuff spot”, but whatever you want to call it, the solidly made, moulded plastic tuff tray with adjustable stand, is our children’s creative stage. Lauded by nurseries and Pinterest posers, tuff trays are the open-ended play station of dreams. It’s no exaggeration to say the kids have used their tuff tray more than anything else we’ve ever bought them.
Our CrazyGadget tuff tray gets used for everything. It’s a crafting station, a building platform, a landscape for open-ended and messy experimental play, a food prep area, a mini dining table and its even great for making a little den. The one we have in our kitchen is one metre across – plenty big enough for 3 or 4 children to really get stuck-in.
Pinterest posing vs. open-ended play
We used to spend hours trawling Pinterest in the evenings for beautifully presented activities to do with the children the next day. Much like we did as newly trained teachers back in the day, we’d spend forever setting out activities, only for them to be finished within minutes. Rarely were the results satisfactory to our industrialised, end-focused adult minds.
We hoped the kids would recreate that perfect Pinterest image. Perhaps we could even share it on social media and show to the world how good we are at being parents. To our dismay, they’d frequently veer off in their own direction.
Honestly, nothing was more frustrating than spending significant time and effort planning for a certain outcome only to have three little imps descend like locusts and ‘destroy’ our plan in a matter of seconds. And yet, who exactly did we do all this for?
We manage our expectations these days, knowing the outcome may (let’s be honest, will) be completely different than intended. Since we began travelling down the unschooling path, the kid’s have more freedom. The result is that we’re not quite as anxious, and on a daily basis they enter full-on creative zen mode. It’s an amazing thing to see!
Nothing felt more frustrating than spending time and effort to plan for a certain outcome only to have little imps descend like locusts and ‘destroy’ our plan in a matter of seconds.
And yet, who exactly did we do all this for?
A blank canvas
Often in the blur of family life we forget to clear the tuff tray but when we do inspiration instantly strikes. Neurones fire in the children’s fizzing little brains and the beginning of a new exploration commences.
A few weeks ago, it was full of sand and other shit and within an hour of it being cleaned the children had made elaborate plastic flower arrangements in a bed of Play-Doh. Our littlest, Annie, was occupied for 40 minutes straight, totally focused and created the most beautiful little garden. They are more than capable of creating order in their own chasm of chaos.
Sometimes, we put interesting nicknacks in the tuff tray and wait for the little explorers to dream up something totally unexpected. Whilst we still plan projects and activities, now it’s almost always in conjunction with them. After all, our choice to unschool is one of giving agency to the children in what they learn and the way they want to learn it.
Over the course of a week we made an awesome, fizzing papermaché volcano in the tuff tray. It was a great success and team effort! I can see us building a more elaborate one with faster reacting substances and pyrotechnics in the future.
Honestly though, the kid’s creativity flows best when the tuff tray has just been emptied and cleaned. A blank canvas ready for whatever free-form play their minds conjure up.
The Lab
The naturally open ended nature of a tuff tray makes it a magical vessel; a literal black hole to which all gunk and gunge gravitates. We’re often not-so-surprised to find chopped vegetables, fistfuls of cereal, lego bricks, play-doh knives and amputated dolls arms all lathered in hair conditioner and left to congeal in a pool of putrid-looking liquid. Totally revolting but the kids LOVE it! Whilst the construction tuff tray’s aren’t anything out of the ordinary, the deep sides hold in the majority of any mess.
Ada, our now five year old, is obsessed with kitchen equipment. She’s been known to wander around the house with nothing but a colander keeping her entertained for over an hour. When not finding whisks in our bed and spatulas in the bathroom, the utensils are often in the tuff tray being used to explore materials and conduct various physics experiments. The tuff tray is their little laboratory!
Their endless experimentation often involves smushing, smashing, mixing and manipulating. About a year ago, Francis – the big one, essentially figured out the first steps of paper recycling when he tore bits of paper, mixed them with water, allowed them to soak and began shaping it.
We’ll often take moments like this, help them verbalise what they’ve discovered. If they’re still interested, we support it with YouTube videos or google images adding real world context to their experiments. Sometimes, it starts a week-long conversation. Sometimes, they’ve already had enough and don’t care. We do our best to acknowledge that the real learning has already taken place. Whether or not they know the name of the process, for the meantime, is often irrelevant.
Crafting a Mess
Watching the different ways kids use the tuff tray at various ages has been fascinating. One snowy day in 2020, when the kids were really little, they moaned “it’s too cold outside” so we took the tray from its legs, placed it on the flour, and filled it with flour. They stripped off and flapped about in their own ‘indoor snow’ for far longer than they’d have lasted in the cold.
Exploring shapes, textures, colour and materials is a natural part of development. This is where the tuff spot as a learning platform really excels. Some of the kids’ favourite things to do in it include:
- Making coloured spaghetti, fake snow and slime
- Playing with kinetic sand
- Painting (often on themselves!)
- Exploring objects they’ve found in the garden or on walks, like leaves, sticks, conkers and shells
- Making patterns with loose parts – gems, beads, buttons
- Potion making and water play
- Combining all of the above
Now the kids are a little older, they can reach the craft materials in the cupboards – sequins, pipe cleaners, paper, hole punches, sellotape, glue and glitter. They are not afraid of making a mess, doing something ‘wrong’ and testing their skills whenever the need takes hold of them. Although now they can reach the scissors they have become grand masters in the art of destruction and demolition!
After a fun session of saturating themselves during water play, or popping it on the floor to make an indoor paddling pool, it can take a little while to empty out! You could use the decanting method (if you dare suck on the end of a straw connected to their experimental swamp water. But once we’ve scooped out a few mixing bowls-full, we use a Karcher Window Vac. It’s better for cleaning up spillages than it is for cleaning windows.
Top tip: Use a drawstring bag for lego. It wraps around the tuff tray perfectly and can be tidied away in an instant. This Santa’s sack will literally save you hours of your life!
Build it up; knock it down
Think about the toys you played with most as a child – you probably had some sort of construction/building toy on that list. Who doesn’t like to build stuff and command the world around them?
Lego, Megablocks, Mecano, Magnatiles and other construction toys play such an important part of a child’s development – fine and gross motor skills, exploration of geometry, pattern and stability and logical decision making to name a few key things to come from this type of play. Toys are not even necessary – kids can build with anything – sticks, stones, straws, the list goes on.
The tuff tray is a GREAT place for combining building blocks with other stuff. What does their castle look like showered with glitter? Is their Magnatile creation water tight? And if it does seep water, maybe something thicker like soggy Weetabix might stay in? The beauty of the plastic building toys is that most of them are easily cleaned.
And why does the fun need to end on top of the tuff spot? It’s great for den building! There have been many times we’ve walked into the kitchen to hear giggling coming underneath in the fort the kids have built with scarves, blankets and cushions. We’re just jealous that we don’t fit underneath.
Collaboration and cooperation
Learning to share resources is a challenge, at times, even for us adults!
Play at the tuff tray provides ample opportunities for practicing this skill and negotiating to acquire a desired object. Particularly, when multiple siblings or friends are playing with the same stuff. It’s definitely a work in progress but the children are gradually assimilating some of the hostage negotiation techniques I’ve picked up from Chris Voss’ Never Split the Difference book.
“It seems like you’re really enjoying playing with that Spatula. When you’ve finished, please may I have a go.” When they use this kind of phrase the results are always pleasing to see with a calm exchange of valuable resources. For now, that’s often forgotten in favour of the snatch now, scream later technique.
Pack it away
Our tuff tray takes up significant space but functions nicely to quickly hide the three stackable Ikea steps that often lay in our way around the kitchen. Packing away is relatively straight forward. Once cleaned you can hang it on a nail in the wall and fold up the legs (ours were a bit sticky but loosened up over time). But, if you’re anything like us, it’ll get left out as it’s used so often. Whilst we’d love to reclaim that metre squared space for ourselves. We simply cannot part with this beast of a learning tool.
Are tuff trays worth it?
The tuff tray is by far the most used thing we’ve ever bought for the children. The possibilities are literally endless. We’ve had a lot of fun playing at it with them and sometimes we even use it on our own.
Why not?
Like what you’ve seen? Get a CrazyGadget tuff tray here.
