Many of you know that I was scheduled to teach at a friend’s art class. Well the last two weeks, I taught grade school knitting.

What I Mean By – “I Taught Grade School Knitting”

My friend is an art teacher at a Montessori school. She has two, one-hour, back-to-back classes of about 12-14 grade school students on Wednesdays. She asked me to teach her two classes how to do basic knitting. And then to come back the following Wednesday to do a follow-up class on knitting.

I set up small “kits” of yarn and needles to make bookmarks. My friend indicated that Montessori students learn fine-motor skills and hand-agility early, so I brought both fingering-weight and worsted-weight kits.

Overall, this was an amazing experience for me. The students seemed to enjoy it as well.

The first class I taught were a bit younger than the second class. The second class also had a few students who knew how to knit already.

A few surprises:

1. These students were amazingly attentive and respectful both of me and each other.
2. Montessori encourages students teaching students, which helped a lot with a 12-14 student class.
3. Montessori classes encourage the students to work on those aspects of the subject that they’re interested in pursuing. So after about 10 minutes of instruction, students could go do “open studio” work on any projects available to them (painting, drawing, clay, printing, fiber-arts, etc.).

So, I ended up teaching to a group of 12-14 young people for about 10 minutes. Those who were still interested and didn’t prefer to work on something else (art-related) stayed to work on their casting on and knitting.

This Week’s Follow-Up

I came back for the same two 1-hour classes. To answer any questions, help anyone who needed it with their knitting and show anyone interested how to bind off and weave in ends.

Surprisingly, the first of the two hour classes had younger students and fewer people who already knew something about knitting. On the follow-up class, I had five students in the first hour still working on their knitting project, and none in the second hour

Here are some photos (with childrens’ faces obscured for their safety).

I can’t describe how fantastic it was to be with these young people. It was icing on the cake for those who expressed interest an enthusiasm.

Current Crochet

Having had a chance to see yarn and fiber-arts through the eyes of young people, I decided to make a crochet thermal stitch beanie in bright, glittery yarn.

Not really my style. But I still love how this stitch looks and feels. Even with glittery yarn.