This post is about my students’ embroidery. Specifically, the students who come to me during tutorial and lunch for fun. (The next post will be about my ELL kids and their in class assignment)
The goal of tutorial/lunch embroidery is for the kids to explore materials I cannot teach in class and to have fun expressing themselves. They had complete freedom in picking their designs. They could either use a stencil, draw their own sketch or get my help.
They were instructed to learn the basic stitch by embroidering their names.
They had the possibility of embroidering something on the opposite side of the cloth as it will be folded in half and blanket stitched together as a pouch.
The project is taking much longer than planned but the kids have not lost their enthusiasm or motivation (for the most part). I wish I could post pictures of the kids embroidering but I am afraid that even with permission slips, a personal blog is not an ok place to post them.
My school has a lot of events and I was in a bind for a display, so I displayed my students first attempts at embroidery…
Isabel is a very special case, she came in, tried and gave up straight away. So I asked her to come back the next day and if she still didn’t like it, I would give her another project to do (I do that often for my 7th grade social studies kids).
She came back the next day and decided she wanted to try again, I showed her a new technique and she bloomed all on her own! In her own words, from her thank you note to DonorsChoose, “Thank you for giving us supplies for embroidery for the needles and the thread. At first I wanted to give up because I didn’t know what to do, but now I am so good at it.”
She’s very good at it indeed! I am so proud of her.
Annie is one of those kids that never speaks, never! She just sits down and focuses on her work, a world war could be happening around her and she would still be completely engaged with her work. Unlike the majority of my other kids, she doesn’t want to talk to me or socialize, she just likes the outlet of art. She is such a sweet kid. She happens to be very quick as well, with one demonstration from me, she can not only replicate it but she can read my mind and tell where I want her to go with it.
Her work with the fall tree will turn out amazing when it is done, I know it.
Karen, on the other hand, is totally there for talking, talking and more talking. She is this tiny little girl full of energy! I never thought of her as a girly girl but she really wanted a bow and tiara… Then I realized that all of her clothing and headbands, and bags… were the same colors as her bow. Funny how that happens. She is just too cute. She first struggled with “mixing” colors together and creating straight and curved lines but she is really coming into her own.
This robot is hilarious to me. My best friend finds it scary. I am just proud that she took the initiative of drawing and embroidering her own design, the majority of my kids need to be handheld, not her.
This is a robot by a 7th grader. She never speaks because she has such trouble with English. She is an ELL student and I have her in Social Studies. I found out from the other art teacher that has her for art that she is very “talented”. Aside from being talented, she takes initiative, and that is such a rare quality in my students that is needed to become an artist.
This giraffe means a lot to me. This girl really struggled and struggled and struggled some more with the basic stitches, but thanks to her eye for color, this giraffe looks really cool to me.
I have a whole gang of 7th grade ELL girls, often wearing pink, that come during lunch and a grade group period. I wanted them to know that I noticed them and I wanted to have some time where they are my only focus. It is so difficult to conduct a social studies class when 2/3 of your class is fluent in English and 1/3 can barely understand you! I feel so fortunate that my prep period fits with their GD period. I have the cutest picture of my pink ladies on the ledge of my class windows, all embroidering, unfortunately, I will not post that.
I guess I might be delusional, I might see things in these embroideries that are absolutely not objective. I don’t care. My kids are so proud of their work. They had never tried this before and I find their first attempts to be grand! It is worth spending hours threading needles, hearing loud noises during every break I get and getting my favorite scissors taken at least 4 times a day! I am not the only one giving up sleep and free time, these are my students’ breaks too.
