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By Cameron Small
Hometown Weekly Intern
Kids love doing stuff with their hands. Babies will smear food everywhere. Toddlers may take crayons or markers to the walls. For the students in fourth to sixth grade at the Medfield Afterschool Program (MAP), it could be building a ga-ga ball pit. Or it could be building forts in the woods. Or it could be redesigning the rocks at the back of the Dale Street parking lot (between the Pfaff Center and the Dale Street gym) into a “rock village.”
MAP students have built several forts in the woods between the Dale Street School playground and the Pfaff Center. Some are teepee shaped. Others look like tunnels dug out of dirt mounds. And since students are not allowed to go into the woods during school hours, the forts are the work of the MAP students alone.
Unlike the newly built ga-ga pit, however, the forts are made completely out of organic materials: sticks, fallen tree limbs, leaves, and vine, expertly woven together by the skilled hands of MAP students.
The rock villages are built by carefully placing twigs between the ground and edges of the rock, to form walls and door frames. A small downside of the rock village is that they are not big enough for the students to go through themselves.
MAP 4-6 grade Site Director Kurt Jackson is the source for the inspiration and creativity to build. Jackson started the Carpentry Club at MAP, and they started small: building boxes, a puzzle, wood staining, and bird and butterfly houses. After learning how to use power tools, hammers, and tape measurers safely, the eleven boys of the MAP Carpentry Club built the ga-ga ball pit at the Dale Street School playground; the forts and rock villages are the work of other MAP students as well and are not the sole work of the Carpentry Club.
“Under close watch, the students learned how to use these tools safely, and then work together, which is what I was proud of them for,” Jackson said. “For this [the ga-ga pit] especially, because it took teamwork.”
