Henry has been a regular visitor to our shop since he was very young. He has always loved to help as much as possible, which we encourage. Helping in the early years was mostly mimicking what we were doing, often using toy tools rather than real ones. He also enjoyed sweeping the floor or putting away tools that had been used by others. We made sure that all of it was a safe, fun and learning process. It wasn’t long until he was using our tools, and eventually, tools from his own well-equipped tool chest that is still a little taller than him. As he gets older and more capable, he is allowed to actually do real work on our projects. He first carefully listens and watches, learning what we want to accomplish. With our encouragement, Henry is very safety-conscious to a fault. Then, after putting on the appropriate safety gear, he tries on his own.

His absolute favourite time in the shop is spent working on his parade float project. We spend a few hours each weekend building his jet plane. Being seven years old, his attention span lasts a couple of hours at most, which is the perfect amount of time to accomplish a small part of the plane. Today’s first order of business was to drill and grind the custom-made brackets for the canopy struts. Then we fit and welded them into place. Henry helped me bolt the struts into position, and amazingly, they worked perfectly when he happily jumped into the cockpit to test the mechanism.

After each work session, we first take time to admire our progress, then plan out next week’s activity, and make a list of the supplies I’ll pick up during the week. I know he’ll be eagerly counting the days until next weekend when we get to work on the project once more. Stay tuned…