Total Bedlam... and I love it!

Today was day two of Knit Club at my Eli's school and the club has grown totally of a proportion at which I am confident that I can teach the kids anything. There are now 30+ kids (and more want to join, but we've had to turn them away) in the group and two adults. Today we learned the knit stitch. Or rather, we TRIED to learn the Knit Stitch. A half an hour is just not enough time......

I'm hoping I can go into the school and give mini-lessons to a few kids during the day so that I can have a few kids that are more confident knitters to help with the rest......

Here is a link to the full "Knit Class" pdf that I made up. I haven't broken down the other parts so you'll have to download the whole thing to check it out.

Teaching Kids to Knit: A simple knitting course.

Lunchtime is a busy time at my son's school. In order to keep 700 plus students occupied during their lunch break, the school has a multitude of clubs. When I heard that anyone could offer up a club (they must be "sponsored" by a teacher) I decided to start a knitting club.

The plan is simple. I will teach 15-25 pre-adolescent students to knit squares which I will then sew into a blanket that will be donated to the Foothills NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) via the WCOBBS (Western Canada Oddball Baby Blanket Society). Once the students have learned the basics, they will continue to learn on by choosing a project on their own.

In order to facilitate the teaching, I decided to do up a  PDF with the absolute basics that can be printed and handed out to the students for reference. I know my handout works because Dale learned to knit in about two minutes....... and his brain doesn't read instructions very well (not a comment on men and instructions, although it's painful not to go there.... this was Dale's very own glowing reference to my skillz)

I will introduce the PDF in several sections (to make downloading faster). The documents include; casting on, the knit stitch, unknitting, changing yarn, the purl stitch, binding off and mistakes and tips

I've embedded the first PDF (it takes a while to download) below or you can download Cast On, The Knit Stitch and Unknitting




Click the links below for embedded pages of the next two parts (I didn't want to make the download even slower....)

The Knit Stitch

Unknitting