Three rabbits have lived in our preschool for a long time. Gapcio, Szaruś and Beza. Every Child knows them by name, most can tell which is which (Gapcio is the biggest, Szaruś has dark ears, Beza is fair with a darker patch). The Children know when the rabbits are well rested and when they are sleepy. They know that Gapcio prefers carrot to apple, and Beza the other way round. They also know who in the group is on duty for feeding and watering this week — because we, the Krasnoludki, set up such a roster.
This autumn it turned out that the old cage had become too small for our rabbits. Rabbits grow. Rabbits need space. And besides — winter was coming, and our preschool rabbits are not ordinary rabbits, but, as the Children themselves say, “VIP rabbits”. They deserved a new home, larger, warmer, and more befitting their rank.
That is when Mr Screw stepped in.
Who Mr Screw is
In pedagogical literature, figures like Mr Screw are sometimes called “significant adults” — someone outside the Child’s usual circle of carers, who brings into their life specific, useful competences and shows them that adult life is made up of different people who can do different things. With us Mr Screw is a grown-up man who works with his hands. He arrives with his whole toolbox: screwdrivers, hammers, measuring tapes, screws, boards, a drill. And most importantly — he comes with the attitude of someone who knows that a Child can help him.
This is a subtle but very important distinction. In some pedagogies, the adult “runs an activity” for Children — meaning they tell them what to do, and the Children execute. With us, Mr Screw works alongside the Children. That means he has a real goal (to build a cage), he has a concrete plan (we measure, we cut, we join, we paint), and he needs help. The Children are his helpers. Not pretend ones — real ones.
This change of perspective cannot be overstated. A Child who knows they are genuinely needed for a project works differently from a Child who is “playing at helping”. They hold the tool differently, they focus differently, they ask for instructions differently. You can see it with the naked eye. A Child doing something real behaves like a grown-up — even at four, five or six years old.
Mędrki and Elfy get to work
The rabbit cage was built mainly by our two older groups — Mędrki (six-year-olds) and Elfy (five-year-olds). Each group had its own tasks, suited to age and ability. The point was not for every Child to do everything — the point was for every Child to have the chance to perform a specific, meaningful, learnable task.
The youngest measured. They picked up the carpenter’s folding rule (the wooden one, with real centimetres) and laid it against a board. They checked how long it was — one Child measures, another writes the numbers down on a slip of paper, a third hands over the material. Nobody is pretending. Everybody is working for real.
The older ones drove screws. First they drilled pilot holes — under adult supervision, but on their own. Then they took a screwdriver or a power driver and drove screw after screw. They had to learn two things: first, that a screw does not go in faster if you push harder (on the contrary — the tool slips); second, that you have to keep it straight, or the screw will go in crooked. These are physics lessons that no educational video can explain better than your own hand.
The oldest — meaning the children who have already been attending Mr Handyman’s regular sessions for several months and have practice at it — operated the drill. A real cordless drill, with a real bit. The Child holds it with both hands, wears safety glasses, and Mr Screw stands right beside them showing where to apply the bit. The shavings really fly. The wood really gets drilled. And a Child who has just finished drilling their first hole has something in their eyes you never see across the screen of a tablet — genuine pride at being someone who can.
”Not only LEGO bricks”
There is a sentence that came up in one of our conversations with a Parent and which we liked very much. “Your Children show that they can build not only with LEGO bricks but also with real boards and screws.” It sounds like a compliment — but it is also a very astute pedagogical observation, worth unpacking.
LEGO is a phenomenal toy. We are not going to deny it. LEGO bricks teach a Child constructive thinking, planning, focus and patience. Every one of our Children has bricks at home and most of them adore them. But LEGO bricks have one pedagogical feature we often fail to notice: they are predictable. Every brick is the same as another of the same size. Every brick connects well with every other. The world of LEGO bricks is standardised. From the Child’s point of view — everything always fits.
The world of real boards and screws is different. A board can be crooked. A screw can be too short. A hole can come out too narrow. The wood can split. The drill bit can jam. The material has its own life and its own whims. A Child who builds with LEGO bricks learns to design in an ideal world. A Child who builds with real wood learns to design in the real world.
Both skills are important. We want to teach both. But in an era when a Child spends more and more time in simulated worlds — computer games, educational apps, perfectly designed toys — contact with real, recalcitrant, physical material is becoming increasingly rare. And it is precisely this contact that builds the skill we will later, in adult life, call coping with reality.
What a Child builds when they build for an animal
There is one more layer to this project that we consider the most important. A Child who builds a cage for a rabbit is not building an object for themselves. They are building it for someone else — someone they know, someone they like, whose needs they understand. That changes everything.
In Reggio Emilia pedagogy there is something called the “prosocial project” — a project in which the Child does not work for a reward, for a grade, for praise, but for a concrete addressee. It can be another person, it can be a community, it can be an animal. The key is that the Child sees the goal beyond themselves. They see that their work matters to someone else.
The Mędrki and Elfy who drove screws into the new cage for Gapcio, Szaruś and Beza were doing it from a different source of motivation than a Child who hammers nails into a board “for practice”. This was not practice. This was specific help for specific creatures. The Children knew that their new cage would serve a concrete function — the rabbits would have more room, would be warmer, would be happier. That is a sense of agency we often lack in preschool, and which we need very badly.
Many years ago we read a study showing that Children who from the youngest age care for animals at preschool more often, in adult life, engage in various forms of social help. We do not know whether the study will hold up under new replications — but the observation itself feels intuitively true to us. A Child who has cared for a rabbit for four years learns that someone else needs their attention. A Child who builds a cage for it learns that manual skills can serve someone beyond themselves.
Safety, once again
This question always comes up first when a Parent sees in our gallery photos of a four-year-old with a drill in their hands. We always answer the same way and always honestly — safety with us is an absolute priority.
Every such activity takes place in the presence of Mr Screw and the group’s carer, at a ratio of one adult to 3-4 Children working with the tool. The Children wear safety glasses. Tools are matched to age — the youngest are not given a drill. The workstations are prepared so as to limit risk: the board is fixed in place, the bit is sharp (paradoxically, a sharp tool is safer than a blunt one — easier to control), the working area is marked.
And there is one more thing rarely mentioned. Small grazes, calluses, redness — they happen. And rightly so. Because a Child who has once felt that a hammer can hit a finger will never again hold it improperly. The physical world gives immediate, legible feedback — and that is its pedagogical strength. An over-protected Child has no chance to learn these simple truths at all. And then they grow up and it turns out they cannot use any tool, because all their life they were “too little” to try.
What a Parent can do at home
The simplest thing: let the Child actually help. Not symbolically. For real. Let the Child drive screws with you when assembling furniture. Let them measure the wall with you when you plan to hang a picture. Let them hand over tools when you fix something. These are tiny exercises, but their cumulative effect is enormous.
You can also do at home something analogous to our sessions with Mr Screw — choose a project that has a real goal beyond the Child. A bird feeder on the balcony. A ladybird house in the garden. A little shelf for the Child’s books. The important thing is for the Child to see what it will be useful for and whom it will help. The magic of that second thing — that it is for someone — works more strongly than any amount of praise.
And one more thing — please do not correct. Let the crooked little shelf stay crooked. Let the feeder stay uneven. For the Child it is theirs, their own, made from start to finish. It is their proof of their own agency. And from the third year of life a Child collects proofs of their own agency — every such item goes into a treasury they will draw from for the rest of their life.
What this is all for
Because Gapcio, Szaruś and Beza really did get a new, better home. That is a fact. The rabbits sleep in a warmer, larger cage in which they can properly stretch out. That is the first, simplest and most genuine reason.
The second reason is bigger. The girls and boys from the Mędrki and Elfy groups now carry an image in their heads: we remember how we built a cage for our rabbits. We remember how Mr Screw showed us how to hold the drill. We remember how it was all ours — the idea, the plan, the work, the result. That image will stay with them. Maybe for life. And when one of them, twenty years from now, stands before some hard, grown-up task, somewhere deep inside a voice will speak up: “I have already built a cage for a rabbit. I will manage this too.”
The third reason is the deepest. Because the learning the Children went through while building this cage cannot be locked into any single category. They practised fine motor skills — yes. They learned principles of physics — yes. They cooperated in a group — yes. They cared for animals — yes. But above all they experienced something that in pedagogy we call holistic experience — full, real, multidimensional. Such experience cannot be planned into a lesson schedule. Such experience happens to a Child if we create the right conditions for them.
And we, the Krasnoludki, do everything to create such conditions. Because we know that a Child equipped with real experiences walks out into the world with something that cannot be bought.
Watch the reel from the build → See the post about our mini builders →