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By Mike Nowell
Woodshop, Oldest Group Sports Teacher & Computer Network Administrator

I have been lucky enough to spend the past quarter century working with children in a discipline that keeps me learning right alongside my students. On its surface, Shop appears to give children experience with using woodworking tools – and indeed it does, but creative woodworking provides a wonderful medium for exploring, discovering and employing knowledge from a rich collection of fields of study. The education that occurs through project work in the shop is integrated of necessity as each component that pertains is essential to the completion of the proposed or selected design.

What follows is a necessarily limited look at the curricula that are fluidly incorporated in thought, discussion and action in any given Shop class that I prepared for the most recent Learning Exhibition. (My apologies for an abbreviated list format that reads significantly more dryly than the descriptions of project work outlined in my newsletters.)

Through designing and/or executing woodworking projects, through disassembly and repair of electronic devices at the Tinker Table and/or by integrating electronic components into their woodworking projects students learn to:

Physical Education

• Initiate, control and coordinate large and small motor movements
• Regulate physical effort for short or long tasks

Art

• Represent their project ideas through rough and/or precise drawings
• Represent their project ideas two-dimensionally, three-dimensionally and from different perspectives

Math

• Make calculations and assign dimensions to project components using whole numbers and fractions and use measuring tools to transfer dimensions to wood
• Exercise their understanding of spatial relationships in setting up workpieces for sawing and assembling

Science and Technology

• Develop and apply their understanding of basic engineering principles
• Identify types of wood and their characteristics
• Safely use of powered hand tools and bench tools
• Identify and describe the roles of electronic components and wire basic AC and DC circuits

Music

• Use audio cues of rhythms to set steady, sustainable paces when sawing, hammering and carrying out other repetitive tasks
• Develop and apply their understanding of frequency, pitch and tone production to the manufacturing of simple string and wind instruments

Language Arts

• Use words to describe their internal plans and follow both verbal and written instructions
• Verbally recount the tasks they accomplished that session noting the tools, techniques and internal dialogue they used to see the work through

Social Skills

• Be responsive to the needs of others for tools, materials, space and support
• Respect and be supportive of others work

Personal Growth

• Value and commit to their own ideas
• Realistically assess their level of skill and capacity for work and choose projects that stretch them in both areas
• Learn to identify and make adjustments to unrealistic expectations
• Develop and call on emotional resilience to persevere through difficult tasks
• Acknowledge, learn from and overcome mistakes
• Delay gratification

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