Last Thursday was a hectic one and I'm still recovering. Frost Road elementary applied for a $5000 grant with the intention of using it for an event called 'Express Yourself'. It was an opportunity for kids to learn skills that wouldn't ordinarily be taught in elementary skill. The idea was to have parents volunteer their time for four Thursday mornings and teach a group of kids. I volunteered to do woodworking for 6-12 kids with a couple of parent helpers. Unfortunately only about 20 parents volunteered to teach for a school with 560 kids. This left myself and another parent with 30 kids. That's a lot of bird houses.
The prep work alone was probably about 30 or 40 hours between the two of us as we had to cut parts for 30 bird houses and buy all the tools and materials. Our budget was roughly $500.00 and we managed to get quite a few tools. 30 tape measures, 30 pairs of safety glasses, 6 pairs of pliers to hold the nails, 4 nail sets, 12 glue bottles and a dozen hammers. We also bought about 150 linear feet of 1x6 pine.
When the principle called to let us know the details he promised us as many as 10 helpers. (Our 10 helpers are shown on the left.)
When we sat down to put together a lesson plan time was our biggest worry. We only had from 9:00a to 10:15 plus 15 minutes to cleanup. On day one we figured we would hand out the supplies, have them mark their pieces and drill the holes for the bird and the perch. We also set up a few hands on stations where they could try out a hand brace and some planes.
Amazingly we managed to get everything done that we planned.Unfortunately there was a mix up with the scheduling and we only had 15 kids. The others were at their high school orientation. Day two will have 30 kids with 15 of them being a day behind.
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