Fibers and More

Dear Parents,

Wonderful Day at Garfield Park

I hope you have enjoyed the first warm week of spring!! Our trip to Garfield park was a wonderful way to celebrate the beautiful natural world. We ended the day with service to our local park by cleaning the grounds we run and play on. It was a fun and fulfilling day….A great way to kick off spring break.

Fibers

For the past two weeks, the children have been working extremely hard: skirting, washing, carding, spinning, rolling, weighing, and measuring yarn. The work began with a mass of shorn, raw wool filled with all kinds of plant and undesirable organic material. The first week, the children worked in small groups preparing the wool to be spun. After Ms. Leidy demonstrated to the children how to use a drop spindle, they were off….spinning. The end result were balls of yarn measuring between 20 ft and 160 ft. Each morning lesson ended with plenty of time for clean up and twenty minutes of journal writing in which the children were asked to write what they experienced that day. To help with their writing, a word bank was created from our daily review. It was from this word bank that we chose the spelling words for next Friday.

Our sensory experience of fibers expanded to include other animal furs such as llama, goat, and soon to come angora. Recently we moved to the plant world of cotton. A completely different experience with different expectations for it to be successfully spun. In fact, its shorter fibers calls for a more delicate approach to spinning. Before working with cotton, it was discovered that the fibers of this plant was worn by everyone. It is everywhere. We have closets filled with this wonderful material. The children could not fathom having to do all this work for every garment created. We will return to this plant in the later grades through a different lens: that of the cotton picker.