It’s been a long, tough road for students the past year and a half. As they started to get back to the swing of things, a group of EDSS students jumped at the chance to develop a new project that saw them create something for the younger generation.
EDSS teacher Kevin Hodd coached his students through the woodworking project, which had the added advantage of providing them with some new skills.
“The students were building mud kitchens for the kindergarten class at St. Jacobs Public School. They were excited – it’s something we don’t normally get to do. When the principal reached out to us, it was a project we were willing to take on. It’s something outside the norm in this class, but it’s something we enjoyed and something we’d do in the future. It was a great project for them” explained Hodd.
The students who created the outdoor mud kitchen for the St Jacobs kindergarteners were a group of Grade 11 and 12s taking a construction tech class at the Elmira high school. It took them close to a week to create two versions of the wooden kitchens, which consist of wooden features such as a countertop attached to a wooden backdrop. They were able to find a sink and measured out the wood to fit around it perfectly, he added.
The class features lessons about construction, tech and woodworking, making this an interesting project for the high school students to take on, said Hodd. In the construction class students will typically learn useful skills they can apply later such as framing of walls, electrical work, plumbing, and other faces of residential home builds.
“It gets them using tools, so using mitre saws, table saws, using the cordless drills, putting screws in and it gets them into the drawing aspect as well. So as a class, we did a drawing of the layout, we sent it to St. Jacobs,” he said. “They were happy with it so we took what we put on paper and actually used materials to build it and put it together.
“They thought it would be a good project for EDSS and it was a good way to get everyone involved and build together and help one another out.”
