Righty Tighty

Tools are probably at the top of every preschool engineer's "list." There are lots of tools out there for pretend play. Mikey loves getting his hands on our neighbor's bag of home depot lawn toys, complete with a chainsaw. However, I'm going to offer these screw-based toys for two reasons. First, I have great success with Mikey when I stick with circular motion as a theme. Second, these toys come with purposeful activities so your child doesn't go off inventing things to work on...like trying to actually hack down a tree with a toy saw.

Toys
Battat makes some great take-apart toys for your preschool engineer to practice righty tighty and lefty loosey. The Take Apart Crane listed below was a huge hit because of the claw attached to the boom. It is sturdy enough for simple play - Mikey likes to put his "treasures" in the claw for safe keeping. However, it took him some time to keep from getting frustrated that the truck kept coming apart. He didn't want to have to keep fixing it!


The Design and Drill toy by Educational Insights give your preschool engineer hands-on time to figure out righty tighty and lefty loosey. What I like about this toy is the variety of ways the child can work with the screws. They can use their fingers to develop their fine motor coordination or they can use a hand-driven screw driver. There is also an electric screw driver just like the one in the garage, except safer, that Mikey loves to use for the power of it (just like Tim Taylor in "Home Improvement").


A Video
"Grease Monkeys in Space " is a great episode of Curious George for a preschool engineer to see a screw driver in action. Indeed, George uses "righty tighty" and "lefty loosey" to do his work in outer space.