Woodworking Instructor

Woodworking Instructor Description

Start crafting your future this summer! As a camp counselor and woodworking instructor at Falling Creek, you’ll be working with your hands and helping campers bring their projects to life! Learning to create and appreciate aesthetics is critical to a boy’s healthy development, and you’ll be helping campers unlock their inner creativity, learn new woodworking techniques, and shape new things out of wood. Whether campers are experienced craftsmen or just trying something new, art counselors at Falling Creek are able to teach to all levels, with a variety of traditional and electric woodcraft tools.

You can read more about creativity and woodworking at Falling Creek in this blog.

What’s a Typical Day Like For This Position?

Male camp counselors live in a cabin with one other counselor and eight campers. In addition to their activity instruction, male counselors will have an assortment of responsibilities related to the management of their cabin. Female camp counselors also serve as activity staff, but don’t live in cabins with the campers, and are responsible instead for organizational tasks during the times that male staff are busy with their cabins.

At Falling Creek, campers are free to choose the 6 activities they want on their daily schedule. Even though you might have 8 boys in your cabin who are the same age, you’ll be instructing a variety of ages and skill levels throughout the day in your 50 minute long activity periods. On a typical day in the wood shop, you might give lessons on how to use a hammer, safely cut with a band saw, or use joints to assemble a box. You have the opportunity to teach boys how to make projects like birdhouses, toy cars, ping pong paddles, small oars, wooden boxes, or any other creative options they imagine. You and your fellow woodworking instructors will have lesson plans (that you can help build!) that will be tailored for the different levels and abilities of your campers.

Why Should You Be a Woodworking Counselor?

Each day at camp brings adventure, physical recreation, and endless opportunities for personal and professional growth.

As a woodworking instructor and camp counselor, you’ll be a role model for the boys both in and out of the wood shop, and will gain valuable experience in both teaching and crafting with wood. Woodworking instructors play an important role for children learning creative expression, fine motor skills, and inventiveness. If you’re majoring in art or education, being a summer camp art instructor will give you helpful skills for your future career path. Even if your college major is unrelated to this craft, you’ll still be gaining leadership skills and networking connections that will give you a competitive edge in the job market, no matter where you’re headed next.

We don’t start you at the bottom and give you busywork; you are directly involved in running camp and helping campers succeed. If you are a male counselor, you’ll be responsible for the eight campers in your cabin, as well as the campers you instruct in your activity(s). Instructing a group of campers will challenge you, but you’ll learn how to be a more engaging and encouraging teacher, better logistics manager, and help boys learn new skills that can easily lead to new passions. At the end of the summer your teaching and leadership skills will become more defined and polished.