finger knitting

It was my turn to be sick this week, so our schoolwork has been very low-key and from my bed. That sort of thing lends itself towards crafting, so I ditched my plans to work with a little Language Arts Skills block (which we'll pick up later in the winter) and instead started finger-knitting with the kids, as a background for some needle-knitting we're going to be doing this winter with another family or two.

Enki Education has a great story to introduce the finger-knitting verse (based around the frog life cycle, it's really quite clever), so we worked with that and then moved on to the actual craft work. Even though the story was geared towards Kindergartners (which is when most folks introduce finger-knitting to their kids), Zoo Boy's fine motor skills were no where near ready for that sort of thing when we were doing K. But it was a really good fit now.

Not surprisingly, J, our experienced crochet fan, took to the finger-knitting right away, and was pretty excited to be shown a new way of stringing rows of knots together.


Zoo Boy was less enthusiastic, and insisted pretty much the entire time that he wasn't going to like knitting. Anticipating that, I had told J not to tell him the name of what we were doing at first, and that worked for a while to keep him with us, until he asked me what this was called, then I had to fess up. By then, he'd already created a short row of knitting, so although he complained about not liking knitting, he was still pretty proud to show off what he'd accomplished by the time we were done with it.

J shows off his work-in-progress. I whipped up a quick chain that was just long enough to show them some of the things that could be made from finger-knitted chains. I told them we could shape them and spray them to make them stiff for ornaments for our holiday tree (I had no takers on that). I showed them that they could be belts, or bows, or lengths of rope, or collars for stuffed animals. No one seemed too enthusiastic, but we'll see if some ideas churn up after it rests in their minds for a bit.

Then I showed them how to bind off. Zoo Boy shows off his finished tube. I told him that working on finger-knitting is good for his handwriting -- I'm not sure he bought it, but he agreed that he'd rather be knitting than writing, so that's something anyway.

Our morning's work -- the blue is mine, the purple is J's, the green is Zoo Boy's.

If nothing else, they've made really good cat toys, they all disappeared off the bed within five minutes of having finished them and haven't been seen since.