If I Had a Hammer

By Mark Mabry, Head Teacher

Visitors to our classroom—prospective parents, students, other educators—are often surprised when they step onto the patio and witness children independently wielding real hammers and nails at the woodworking table. They frequently express amazement at both the confidence we have in children to learn the necessary skills in a safe manner, and the children’s competence in using real tools and in planning their constructions.

But what they don’t have the luxury of witnessing is the amount of time that the children spend learning, exploring and practicing with nails, hammers and clamps. Woodworking is an activity that is offered almost every day at school, and like other open-ended offerings, such as paint, blocks, clay, paper, tape, sand and water, it allows children to learn its affordances and develop strategies based on their experiences working with it.

Woodworking at first is not an experience where the goal is to “build something,” but rather one in which children learn foundational skills such as where to hold the hammer so it’s optimally balanced, how hard to strike the nail to drive it into the wood, and the necessity for continually looking at what you are hammering. Suggestions from a teacher help them learn, but the immediate feedback of whether a nail stays in a piece of wood helps even more. The first piece of woodworking that goes home may look unimpressive to someone who wasn’t present during its creation—a single nail in a small rectangular slab of pine—but it represents a child’s hard work and persistence.

Weilding both hammer and pliers takes time to learn.

As their basic hammering skills become more developed, we introduce children to a technique of connecting two pieces of wood to each other by using a small pegboard bridge spanning both pieces of wood. It is typically not obvious at first how to arrange the bridge across adjacent wood blocks in order for them to attach to each other. It’s somewhat analogous to connecting two pieces of paper together with tape: For success, the woodworker must position some of the connector over each piece. When bridging two pieces of wood, one hole needs to be placed over each of the pieces. Over time they develop an understanding and intuitive feel for how these bridges can work in their constructions. Other strategies and mastery of techniques emerge over time for driving a nail all the way into a piece of wood: starting the nail into the wood with or without a teacher’s help, developing a feel for how hard a nail needs to be struck, adjusting the stroke of the hammer when the nail begins to go in at an angle. As all of the skills and knowledge about using these tools and materials become ingrained, we see children looking at the various shapes of wood available in a more strategic way.

Some children like to gather pieces of wood from the bin, arrange them in a design and then begin connecting the whole construction, while others prefer to start with two pieces of wood and return to the bin to select additional pieces as they build. The first technique has the challenge of keeping the original shape intact while all the pieces are rotated and adjusted so that the area being worked on can be clamped and hammered. The latter method tends to evolve and suggest ideas to children that they may not have originally envisioned. For some woodworkers, the size, length and number of pieces used in their work seem to be the inspiration. Many children treat the different-shaped pieces as an open-ended puzzle, and fit shapes together until an object suggests itself to them. For instance, a triangle atop a rectangle might appear as a house to one child, but as a rocket to another. As children gain more experience with connecting and arranging the pieces, their designs become more complex and innovative.

Some projects evolved a piece at a time while others were completely planned and then connected.

The constructions that children create at the woodworking table hold various meanings for them. For some, two pieces of wood connected together with nails firmly in place represents the simple accomplishment of persistence and hard work. Some delight in connecting pieces of various shapes in a way that suggests an object such as a train, a plane or their daddy. And some children find satisfaction in fitting together the wood blocks into increasingly complex patterns, exploring ideas of symmetry and flow.         

This simple rocket-plane has moving parts.

There is also a great deal of inspiration derived from watching others working nearby. Ideas tend to “go viral” as children observe and absorb different ideas from each other. Woodworking sometimes requires learning patience—there is a lot of waiting and watching involved, especially if you need the teacher to help you hold a nail while she is assisting another child. However, this has the benefit of allowing children to pause and think about their own work, as well as observe and reflect on what they see other children are constructing and techniques that their peers might be using. Recently, some children have seen this “down time” as an opportunity for independence and collaboration. A few of the children have taught themselves how to hold their own nails with fingers or pliers, and some have learned how to hold the wood down with their hand while hammering with the other. Children have begun discussing with each other what they are working on and offering suggestions. Others have offered to use the pliers to hold the nails for their friends so that waiting for the teacher is unnecessary.

One “train” creation inspires another.

As children have become experts in using the tools and understanding the techniques to accomplish their goals, they have challenged themselves to try more elaborate ideas with wood. Some children have planned constructions that are so complex that they have required multiple days at the woodworking bench to complete them. Several children noticed that projects that were taken home had come apart, and so they brought them back to school for repairs and enhancements. A few children looked at their finished work and requested paint to decorate their creations. This has evolved into many children using tempera, watercolors, markers and pastels as a part of the post-construction process.

Working with negative space to create a human figure.

Most of the woodworking projects created at the table have been linear constructions connected with bridges at adjacent edges of the wood pieces. As time went on, children began trying to connect pieces at their points rather their straight edges, leading to experimentation with negative space and moving parts. As the end of the year approaches, there has been a growing interest in figuring out how to construct in 3-D, both in connecting stacked pieces of wood, and in attaching wood pieces at 90-degree angles to the flat pieces. Attempting to accomplish this type of construction has allowed both children and teachers to step back and ponder how to use our knowledge, skill and experience with tools and techniques in a very different way: “Where do the nails go?” “Do you still use bridges?” “How do you position and clamp the pieces to the bench?” As with anything worth pursuing, what makes woodworking compelling is that it continues to generate challenges, questions and opportunities for problem solving.

A multi-day project that required planning and persistence.

Working in three dimensions required thinking hard about how to make connections.

The basic woodworking setup consists of tools and construction materials. The wood consists of sections of 1-by-2-inch pine boards cut in various shapes: squares rectangles, triangles, diamonds and trapezoids. The nails we provide are galvanized roofing nails in two lengths: ¾ inch and 1½ inch. Pine is selected for its softness and roofing nails for the large flat heads, allowing young carpenters to drive in the nails more successfully. We also provide “bridges,” small pieces of pegboard spanning two to four holes that enable children to connect adjacent pieces of wood to each other. Each child at the woodworking bench is provided with a pair of safety goggles, an 8-ounce ball-peen hammer and a C-clamp to secure their projects. We also provide needle-nosed pliers for teachers to help hold the nail until a child has hammered it sufficiently to stay in the wood on its own.