School-age 3 has been feeling creative during program and wanted a challenge. The educators thought long and hard about what would be best to challenge not only their hands but also the brains of the children. The activity that could challenge them? Knitting! While normal knitting uses two needles, the group was taught to use a knitting loom. These looms are circular and come in various sizes. Once a loom size was picked, the children in School-age 3 chose the yarn they wanted.
This proved to be difficult as the yarn that we had was much too short to finish a true product. Bothered by the fact that there was lots of string but at the same time not enough, the first task in learning to knit was to find string long enough. When that attempt failed, the group had to figure out a different solution. Eventually, it was found that tying the string ends together was the solution that solved the problem. By tying multiple strings together, projects could then get started.
Once the string had been collected, the group then was taught how to weave the yarn around the pegs of the loom. The specific way of weaving was tough, requiring them to weave the yarn opposite to what they expected, but they learned how to do it, it became easy! Projects spanned multiple days, even weeks, as row by row the children in School-age 3 used the looms very consistently.
Finally, after many days of hard work, many of the children decided their loom weaving projects were complete so they brought the loom project over to Educator Ali and asked him to help finish it. It was explained that to finish a knitting project we had to do what’s called “casting off”. So, Ali casted off the looms, and suddenly there were many headbands and hats all over! To enhance this, our loom set also provided pom pom makers and the children learned how to create pom poms that could attach to their hats, completing the look.
The children were very proud of their creations, beginning to wear them right away and even integrated them into their daily winter gear! This was such a great way to learn how to make our own hats and headbands. The ability to create something long term and more difficult such as this really helps to reinforce how important it is to persist and continue to try and finish projects or ideas to their fullest. Because you never know, maybe something cool would end up being made!
