When my kids were in Elementary School, they had terrific teachers who were interested in providing new experiences to their students. As I volunteered in their classrooms, I naturally talked about my interest in quilting and several teachers asked me to talk to the kids.
This was one of my favorite things to do, and over the years I spoke to countless numbers of classes.
I would start by talking about the different shapes of fabric pieces….squares, triangles, rectangles, etc., and then start putting those shapes together to form blocks. The kids always enjoyed trying to guess what the blocks were called….or why they were called that!!
Then we would start looking at quilts (mostly traditional quilts made by my Mom), searching for the blocks and shapes that we had previously discussed.
I would end the talk by reading “Sam Johnson and the Blue Ribbon Quilt”…..
It is such a sweet book about two rival quilting guilds….the women’s group and the men’s group.
They are both making quilts for the county fair competition, each wanting to beat the other.
The men are making a Flying Geese quilt….
…and the women are making a sailboat quilt….
But, as life would have it, a strong wind blows up while they are taking the quilts to the fair, and both quilts are dumped into a mud puddle.
Instead of seeing the destruction, they each notice how wonderful the other group’s quilt is. They decided to take the best bits from each quilt and make one quilt out of them, calling it “Flying Sailboats”!!
And, of course, the quilt WINS!!!
Each page has a quilt block border around it and all of the illustrations are well done.
If you want to start teaching kids about quilting, I highly recommend it!!
In a few of my kid’s classes, I helped them make a classroom quilt….come back tomorrow, and I will share some of those quilts with you!
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In this blog, I post stories about creativity, techniques, tools of the trade, and lots more about the wonderful art of quilting. If you are enjoying these posts, please subscribe to be notified of each new blog as it becomes available.
This is a wonderful lesson plan that other quilting moms can offer to do for their kids’ classes!
I loved doing it Andrea and enjoy doing more of it but have lost all of my contacts now!!