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Woodshop in the Digital Age

What is woodshop without wood? That was the question Lower School Art Teacher Allison Yancone had to answer while transitioning her class to virtual school. What she crafted for her students relied on different materials and tools, but kept the core concepts at the heart of woodshop.

In traditional school, lower schoolers enter the woodshop in first grade and are immediately enamored by the drills, saws, and hammers. Soon after, they have acquired skills they can use for the rest of their lives. Creative thinking, problem solving, and the basic principles of engineering are far more important to woodshop than hammers and nails. To that end, the challenges Yancone put to her students forced them to think even more creatively and to look further outside the box for solutions to their problems. 

Students were challenged with building forts, creating toys that had moving parts, crafting accessories for a toy they own, making wearable designs, building paper towers, or creating an instrument or noisemaker all from materials available to them at home. The ingenuity students showed in completing their tasks was remarkable and the joy they experienced while learning was apparent in their final products.