Louisville’s Allison and Luke Johanson watched a PBS woodworking show that mentioned Sloyd, a Scandinavian program that uses woodworking to teach character traits, and wanted to try it with their own young children.

They liked it so much, they decided to offer it as a summer class in a park. As they expanded, they made the Sloyd Experience a nonprofit in 2019. Then a few years ago, they turned an unused Louisville Elementary School classroom into a workshop, adding kid-sized workbenches and tools.

Along with teaching after-school and summer classes for a fee, they teach in-school sessions for free at the school by using fundraising and fees from the after-school classes to cover the cost.Locating in a public school, Allison Johanson said, is key to their mission to make the program as inclusive as possible.

“We want to provide it in an equitable and accessible way,” she said.

Sloyd is in its third year of providing the in-school classes. Last school year, Boulder Valley initially planned to require the program to be offered only after school because of concerns about preserving instructional time. But the district agreed to continue to allow it during the school day after parents and teachers lobbied the school board.

This school year, small groups of second graders and fifth graders are attending 45-minute sessions once a week, with the schedule developed by the teachers and principal to make sure they’re not missing classroom instruction. The woodworking lessons, the Johansons say, are teaching kids to have a growth mindset, which in turn will help them in their regular classes.

The character traits that are the focus of the program are self-reliance, concentration, perseverance, resilience, neatness and a love of labor. Students also use math as they measure and write a reflection paper after completing each project.

“We’re not trying to make carpenters here,” Luke Johanson said. “We’re trying to make good human beings. Woodworking is just our medium.”

Friday, during the first session for a fifth-grade group, he went over safety rules and gave students a tour of the workshop. The tour included the “learning wall,” where he used his failed projects as examples. As the class progresses, he told them, they can add their own mistakes to the wall.

“Everything up here, I had a vision, and it didn’t quite go as planned,” he said. “We’re going to look at mistakes as an opportunity to learn. You’ve heard the term practice makes perfect? I prefer practice makes progress. We don’t expect perfection here. We only expect that you try your best.”

Safety rules include always using the vise on the workbench to hold the wood pieces in place, allowing students to keep both hands on the handle of the saws and other tools — and their fingers safely away from the blades. There are also optional safety glasses and ear protection.

After the safety lesson, most of the students practiced measuring and cutting 1-inch slices off pieces of wood, while the two students who previously took Sloyd classes continued working on more advanced projects. Allison Johanson said one of the key components of the program is keeping the groups small enough to give students individualized attention, allowing them to progress at their own pace.

All the projects are for useful items, including a pencil sharpener, ring toss, shelf, ruler, hat rack and dice. The projects move from easy to hard, with students learning to use new tools as they work through the projects.

“Everything they take home is 100% done by them,” Allison Johanson said. “There are times it’s really hard, and they don’t go home very happy. But they come back and try again.”

Fifth grader Laura Maarse said she’s been really looking forward to learning about woodworking.

“It might be a little tricky, but it looks really fun,” she said.

Classmate Liam Richardson, who previously took Sloyd classes, said his favorite project was making a wood spatula because he “really liked rounding the corners.” It was also one of the hardest, requiring six attempts to get his spatula to look the way he wanted it to.

“Like they say here, practice makes progress,” he said.