Legitimate fidgeting: knitting with kids.

We often teach best what we found hardest to learn ourselves. We know where things can go wrong, and if passionate about our subject, can have remarkable patience. Knitting is a craft I wanted to learn as long as I can remember. It eluded me, not only because it was hard, but because of the way it was taught. There seemed only one "right way" to do it, and so many rules to the craft, that for a novice, it was daunting. Worst of all, my knitting-aunties who promised to teach me had no sense of humor about it.

When I finally found my teacher I was forty years old and painting summer landscapes on Westport Island, Maine. Diane Langley was an experimental fiber artist with enough sense of humor to let me learn at my own unconventional pace. I haunted her all summer, landed on her doorstep with every dropped stitch, and by Labor Day I had completed a sweater which I wear to this day, matching leg warmers and all.

Stages of Knitting

I came home from that summer certain that, if I could learn to knit, so could the students I teach. I began with a volunteer group of eight fourth-graders and now teach every fourth-grader (forty-five in a grade) as part of the art curriculum at Shady Hill School. We begin with the euphemistic "hamster blanket." I cast on ten stitches onto round, bamboo, 16" needles, and on the next row I purl a row with another color yarn. I hand each child his or her sticks and standing behind my willing learner, teach by holding the needles with the child until the student is able to do it alone. I joke about how weird this is, but like a lot of strange techniques, it works.

For this first introductory lesson I invite all colleagues and parents who know how to knit to come to the studio and help. The students sit at tables, backs facing out, with paper and drawing materials to work with until one of us can come to their rescue. By the end of forty minutes, most students can knit. The next day they knit some more on the hamster blankets. When I am confident a child knows how to knit, he or she graduates from hamster blanket to hat.

Knitting a Hat

The skills of casting on, picking up dropped stitches, and adding new are taught later in the process. Each child's hat kit awaits him or her in a plastic zip-lock bag, eighty stitches cast onto bamboo circle needles, in the two colors the child selected earlier. Teaching this craft in incremental phases is one key to its success: you earn the right to begin the hat; you earn the right to take it home and work on it outside of class; you earn the right to begin checkers or another pattern. You work up to these privileges in visible stages.

Why I Teach Knitting

The students remain knitting at tables, their backs to me, until I feel they are launched and independent enough to move to the couches, another earned privilege. Here, something else starts to happen, a feeling of intimacy, and if you ask me, the main reason for the success of the curriculum.

Younger students often work in groups, but an entire class with a teacher sitting eye-level in a cozy circle is very different. As we sit in a circle sharing stories and having conversations, I also play audio tapes of stories. Listening and not talking enables students to concentrate when counting stitches or launching a new pattern.

Graph paper and colored pencils are always available to try out a new design. Students work out their pattern designs of checkers, diagonals, hearts, triangles, etc. on paper first and carry these designs in their zip-lock bag with their hat-in-progress. Because they are knitting in a circle format, even a mistake, if it is repeated, looks like an intentional design.

At the end of the hat project, I may ask a student to graph his or her hat, as in mapping a trip after you've taken it. Students find it empowering to see their design on paper after having realized it in three-dimensional form. As adults, we forget how abstract a concept a graph or a map is; how much abstract thinking is involved in following directions; what essential skills these are in order to plan or build anything.

Aside from the intimacy the craft engenders, there are small motor skills being honed for visible and tangible reasons. I suspect the reason knitting is enjoying such a renaissance is because it feels good, the yarn is sensuous and beautiful, and the product is so satisfying. Knitting is legitimate fidgeting, something you can take with you and do almost anywhere--at the bus stop, on the train, waiting for someone, even while hanging out with friend.

Knitting Is Cross Gender

I often launch the knitting curriculum by asking the question, "Who invented knitting? I'll give you one hint, the inventors were men." After a while a child comes up with nets for catching fish. "That's right," I say, "There isn't a fisherman with a catch who can't mend his nets and in this case mending means knitting. What knitting is," I tell my class, "is just a way of knotting using sticks." That ends the "boys don't knit" syndrome.

After the Hat

When students finish their first hat, they often feel bereft without their knitting to fidget with. I help them launch one of three projects: a teddy bear sweater; a hat for the homeless; or a knitted patch for a blanket for the same shelter. In this second project the child learns to cast on and learns how to purl--another level up in learning to knit.

In fact, the hat is never finished: it's worn for years, passed on to a sibling or cousin, and shows up in family photos again and again. Our fourth graders don't look at a knitted garment the same way as before. Besides, hats are so "in."

NATIONAL STANDARD

Students understand that there are various purposes for creating works of visual art.

WEB LINK

www.AustenArts.com For knitting instructions, see www. austenarts.com/arted/newwindow. html

Judith Austen is an art teacher at Shady Hill Elementary School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, [e-mail]