Our first project in the upper elementary/middle school will be to make what one teacher called "tree cookies." By counting along the rings on a piece of wood, you can create an outline of your own life, noting important years, seasons and events.
I tried making
large cookies from old walnut, but found that the wood was so old and
had been so slow growing that it was hard to count the tiny rings and
there were far too many of them to be relevant to the students' own
story lines without delving deep into the history of their town.So I cut into a piece of hackberry that was cut last winter, and found that it has enough annual rings to go back to the birth of each student. To make cuts like this on the bandsaw takes great care, a tight grip and a sled to hold the round stock square through the cut. The tendency is for the round stock to twist, jamming the blade and ruining it. The sled gives a surface against which the round stock can be tightly gripped.
Wood and human beings are both narrative forms. While we tell our stories in the form of words, either written or spoken, trees record their growth in the form of annual rings. Where there's a knot, there had been a branch, and if there had been a drought or season of wet weather, the rings of the tree remember and can be read, just as one might read a book. Our upper elementary school teacher plans to use the tree cookies to get the children to outline their own lives and the important events that took place within them and then to use that outline as the basis for autobiography.
Make, fix and create...
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