Do Kids Need Engineering Notebooks?

When children are young, they think it is cool when you buy them toys that look like adult toys. For example, you might buy your toddler a plastic hammer, but you would not buy him a 16 oz. hammer to play with, because he might get hurt, and he can’t really operate it. However, as children get older, they often want to use real tools so that they — and you — take them seriously. In preschool years, this behavior is called mimicking, but, as children grow, they are not mimicking; they are developing real skills. When you take those skills seriously, your child is more likely to, as well, but that’s not the only reason your child might need engineering notebooks.

Have you ever watched your child create something and wondered why you had not thought to create it yourself? Children are not bound by the constraints of decades of experience, so they are able to come up with fresh ideas and new ways of using things. What if your child came up with an idea and it was not recorded correctly, so it was easy for someone to steal it?

These notebooks not only show your child that you respect his or her efforts; they also provide a legal format for those efforts to gain recognition. Even if you never have to deal with an engineering nightmare of going to court over someone stealing an idea that your child had, we sometimes go back and look at where our ideas started. These notebooks are built to stand the test of time, so that years later when your child looks back, they have documentation that may be the foundation for a well-formulated invention.