Colorfully painted wood shavings trickle from the workbench onto the grass, there are knocking and hammering at several stations. Two children’s hands tightly grip a saw handle – snip, snip – and a new wooden house has emerged. On Friday, 16 preschool children worked and built together in the garden of the St. Jakobus kindergarten in Vierkirchen. “The sawing and rasping was great,” says six-year-old Maximilian. “The most fun I had was building a brick wall,” says five-year-old Selina.
The local entrepreneur Anton Stichlmeyr, representing the Bavarian construction industry, invited a special duo to the initiative “Master Builders Wanted”: In full overalls, the two figures Harry Hammer and Nicki Nagel – played by Matthias Theobald, 30, and Corinna Sichart, 29, explained , – the children how to use tools safely. In real life, Theobald was an economics student, but he simply has a good hand with children, explains the employee of the Munich association Spiellandschaft Stadt. “The children are often happy when they can experience a male caregiver in the kindergarten during this campaign,” says Theobald. Girls and boys worked with the same enthusiasm and didn’t shy away from pointed nails and sharp saws, says the educator of the owl group, Kathrin Schäfer.
Equipped with yellow helmets, the little ones were able to saw off a cube from a piece of wood and nail a triangular roof onto it. The houses also needed a foundation and a fence. And finally, a miniature version of Vierkirchen was reconstructed with the help of bricks. For educator Schäfer, the visit was a successful change, especially since it was the first such day of action since the Corona pandemic. The donated workbench should now remain accessible to all children in the entrance area. In the spring, the preschool children will also visit a real construction site on site – that’s how long the yellow helmets will stay in the kindergarten.