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Wood Crafts
The act of working with wood encompasses a diverse set of intellectual and emotional skills.
In a well equipped woodworking studio, students in 2nd through 8th Grades acquire the skills needed to design and build projects from jigsaw puzzles to model sailboats. They strengthen fine motor and spatial skills through the supervised use of appropriate tools. While expressing creativity, this handiwork also reinforces math and science concepts such as measurement, proportion, and physics principles. One of the most beloved and long-standing Green Vale traditions is the making of wooden sailboats in 5th Grade - and putting them to the test on the open water in a spirited race day.
Tools as old as Green Vale still work perfectly today.
Students learn traditional hand tools which offer the gift of “slowing down time”. Attention span, focus, and patience are exercised as a result. Students experience tremendous satisfaction from delayed gratification, increasingly rare for young people.
The process of building from wood entails intellectual and emotional skills such as planning, patience, fine motor skills, abstract thinking, precision, measurement, and self-control. Crafts teacher Scott Carro says, “When students bring completed work home, I encourage parents to look beyond just the appearance of the piece. Ask your child what tools they used. Ask what steps they followed in completing it, and what their biggest challenge was.”
