Gotta Love those Kinders

I'm not one to usually use templates but with kinders I sometimes make exceptions. We were doing a 3 day project that included painting, tracing, cutting with a scissors and gadget printing. I decided to create 3 different fish shapes for the students to choose from to trace on the back of their paintings...

As the kids made their choices, I began to have misgivings about creating 'cookie cutter' art - where every project pretty much looks like every other one. Leave it to the kinder kids to put their own distinct style on tracing & cutting when I wasn't looking...

Gotta love 'em...

Woven Pouch

My third graders are beginning to complete their woven pouches. Thought you’d want to see some pix. The students chose a limited palette of 5 colors of yarn. It’s always fascinating to see how the color combinations they choose match their personalities!



The lesson was adapted from the book You Can Weave! Projects for Young Weavers written by Kathleen Monaghan and Hermon Joyner. We used the cardboard from cereal boxes to build our looms.



I have found that using a template to guide the cutting of warp spacing for the loom saves a lot of time. I used to be a purist & taught them how to use a ruler to measure the spaces. I stopped doing that when I realized we were using an entire 45 min. period just for measuring!

I color code the templates so each class has a different color - keeps me from mixing them up! Another tip I use to help speed things along is to pre-cut the yarn into 24” lengths. They really enjoyed using some of the variegated yarns I borrowed from the 4th grade braiding projects.

I’ll be teaching the woven pouch project at our state conference this fall so it’s nice to have these great examples…If you’d like the lesson plan, email me & when I write it up this summer, I’ll send you a copy!