In the school year 2005/06 an experimental teaching experience was undertaken in a primary school in order to promote the knowledge of wood as material. This school is located in Treviso, a province situated in the north east of Italy. The choice of the territory was strategic, because more than 10% of all the employees of the Italian furniture factories are situated in this small area that comprehends 65 contiguous municipalities in the provinces of Treviso and Pordenone.
Despite the ministerial programmes specifically require the presentation of the local factory production and technological products and the problems related to it, the vastness of the arguments allows teachers to deal only with some specific areas of science and technology. From our experience, it seems clear that wood as a material is never covered in school schedules, and treated in a superficial way also in the secondary schools focused on the study of wood industry and furniture market.
The project aims to propose some issues concerning the knowledge of wood, from both scientific and technological point of view, to children attending the last classes of primary school (from third to fifth elementary), in an intuitive way, which develops the operative aspect.
In particular the experiences were structured in order to be:
• practices, to involve children in first person;
• simple and proportionate to the students age and their knowledge, without requiring complicated manual skills or specific equipment;
• funny;
• short in time, talking about lessons time again, which has a strict schedule and predetermined timetables, in order to obtain student’s attention for most of the lesson;
• not dangerous, so that children, aged between 8 and 11 years, were able to carry out all activities without the intervention of adults.
Complementary to the project was the production of teaching materials for the teacher who has been able to face the issue concerning wood also in his curricular activities.