Handwork Through the Year with Jennifer Tan

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Handwork Through the Year with Jennifer Tan Handwork Through the Year with Jennifer Tan Donna: Welcome to the Waldorf connection online expo. Thank you for being here with me tonight. I hope you are getting some valuable information from this expo series that you can take back and apply to your home schooling lessons. When we think of planning, sometimes they can seem overwhelming and how can we get it all organized. So to give you one piece of the puzzle, tonight, is a very talented fiber artist and Waldorf home schooling mom – Jennifer Tan. She’s going to go through her program, Handwork through the Year. So let me just tell you a little bit about Jennifer. Jennifer is a very multi-talented fiber artist, musician, aroma therapist, and home schooling mom of three children. She owns Gosh Yarn It, web store, and sells her amazing goods there and at her site – Syrendell. Featured on HDTV, Jennifer’s, creativity in many areas pour out into her Waldorf-inspired schooling and wonderful creations. Her family’s home schooling blog is syrendell.blogspot.com and also thewaldorfsway.blogspot.com. So, welcome back Jennifer Tan… Jennifer: Thank You Donna for having me back. I appreciate it and I am absolutely thrilled to be speaking tonight about handwork which is one of my favorite topics being a fiber artist myself. And for those of you who can see on the slides, I’m going to be clicking through them, and the pictures that you will see on the slides tonight are real pictures from our home They are actual projects that we have made. Let’s see. Okay. Donna: If you’re on the webcast and you need to start it. You can hit that little thing that says slides and you can watch it go through. Jennifer: Okay. Just to start off tonight, I wanted to do a quick quote from Rudolf Steiner from his book called, Handwork Indications. He said that, “Children who learn while they are young to make practical things by hand in an artistic way and for the benefit of others as well as for themselves, will not be strangers to life or to other people when they are older. They will be able to form their lives and their relationships in social and artistic ways, so that their lives are thereby enriched. Out of their ranks can come technicians and artists who will know how to solve the problems and tasks set us by life.” Just think about how beautiful and says it all right there, by hand - that is so important. So to get started, when we plan our handwork for the year, the very first thing I recommend is to create a calendar. I know some of you out there, probably because its summer, are already thinking about creating your home schooling calendar and I know you all do it in very different ways. So I’m not going extremely specific on how to do it because you will have your own style. There are lots of ways to approach your calendar; one is you can just start with holidays and celebrations. By celebrations, it could be birthdays or father’s day, or special things you do as a family. Holidays could also include the seasons, like summer solstice, like winter solstice, as well as religious holidays and ethnic holidays. When you plug in those holidays and celebrations into your calendar, that automatically gives you lots of excited inspirations for creative projects and that’s are really good place to start. And to be honest with you, I know lots of families that is the only handwork that they do all year – it’s just for the holidays and celebrations because there’s a lot that you can do. Another way to do it and is to tie in your handwork with your curricula and your blocks. So, depending on the ages of your children, you probably already have some blocks in mind for Social Studies, for Science and you can very easily tie in handwork to those blocks. I think that’s a lot of fun. Instead of coming from it like “Well, I want to teach knitting, this time of year,” you might come at it, “Oh, this time of the year, we’re going to be learning about ancient Greece and so let’s look at architecture and geometry and ooh, let’s use do drawings, and oh, let’s maybe make some clay vases, and oh ---“And it just kind of go on and on from there and you get really excited. Before you know it, you’re going to have so many handwork ideas that will tie in with your curriculum. You’re not even going to know what to do with all of them. Another way to look at it is to look at your yearly Waldorf chart. So if you are a Waldorf-inspired home schooling family and you really want to stick to what Waldorf schools do, you can look at… “Okay, my child is in second grade therefore he/she should be crocheting this year.” And that is another way to work into your calendar, the handwork. But that is really up to you. I know some families who stick to that very rigidly and I know other families who look at it as a basis for maybe what we should do this year but maybe their children aren’t interested in crocheting or knitting at that point and maybe they’ll do it later. They might have older children that never learned how to do basic woodworking and so they may introduce it now. And that’s okay too but that’s really up to you and your family to decide. Once you created your calendar, you can then purchase your supplies. And on your calendar, I actually put down dates for me to get the supplies because some supplies are easy to get during the summer. You can order them online, go to the bookstore or whatever that you need to do. Go on Etsy.com but other things, you’ll want to wait and get. So it’s kind of good to sit there and look at the projects that you have in mind and say, “oh yeah, we’re going to do---” like let’s say you’re going to do pottery, but you want to make sure that the clay is really fresh. You don’t want it to sit around in your house the whole year. Then you might want to a month beforehand in your calendar, purchase some clay. Make sure on your calendar that you schedule weekly handwork time. I get a lot of questions about this and this is really a tricky one because people say “Well, how often do I do handwork with my children?” And I don’t know if there’s one magical answer for it. I think you and your family are going to decide what works best for you and I also think that during some times of the year, you’re going to do a lot of handwork and other times you’re not going to do it much and that’s okay. But I do know this from my own experience: when I carve out the time every week, it does get done. And sometimes it might be a daily time and some weeks it might be more like twice a week depending on the project that we’re doing. For instance right now, though it’s summer here and we’re not doing home schooling per se, we are working on a weaving project together as a family. Well, I know that if I just leave that loom out, it could take two years before it will ever get done. If I don’t make sure and actually schedule in some time for everyone to work on it and actually be there to remind each child, “Okay, you’re just do your weaving today.” And it might only take them 5 minutes, but if I stick to my daily rhythm of it, it gets done and it will get done, sooner rather than later. So I do recommend scheduling a weekly handwork time. For me, if I’m teaching something brand new like knitting, crocheting, wood whittling, glass fusing - any of that, I definitely want to do it at least twice a week until the children have achieved a certain level of mastery. So once you’ve created your calendar for the year, then you start to really delve in deep, and go ”Okay, now I need more ideas, patterns and inspiration” or you might have created your calendar and you feel like there some holes in it and you’re like “I just don’t know what else to do.” So here are some of my recommendations. First of all, go to YouTube.com. As many of you know, YouTube is a wonderful resource for being able to watch people do things live. So for instance, when I want to teach people how to do a macramé, --- Well gosh, I haven’t macramé since the seventies and so I did not remember how. It was hard to find books and the books I found are really old and black and white. So I went on YouTube and there were really wonderful videos that were so easy to follow and I was able to watch them and after watching them and doing it myself, the next day I was able to teach my children. Ravelry.com is a fantastic place to get lots of inspiration and ideas and connect with other parents who do handwork, in particular fiber arts.
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