Three boys sat in a school hallway, concentrating on the task literally at hand: knitting.
“Once you get it down, you can focus on it,” said Owen Taylor, a fifth-grader at Central Elementary School. “It just kind of calms you down, if you’ve been doing a bunch of reading.”
“Ever since we’ve started knitting, I got a higher score on my math test,” volunteered Evan Breuker, noting he scored 100 the day before.
|Tips for Teaching Your Child to Knit|
Source: Teaching Children to Knit
Yes, it seems knitting yields benefits both academic and emotional. Yoga, too. Both have been incorporated into the school days of Central fifth-graders this year as ways to reduce anxiety, improve focus and develop self-esteem.
A yoga instructor came once each marking period to help students breathe and stretch. Grandmothers, neighbors and other volunteers arrived on Wednesdays to help them make hats and dish cloths one purl stitch at a time.
While the mind-and-body relaxation of yoga has more obvious benefits, teachers have seen both boys and girls take to knitting with surprising determination.
“Some kids catch on really easily, others are learning about grit,” said Lisa Monroe, who along with Jodi VanDam acquired a program grant from the Kenowa Hills Education Foundation. “It’s exciting when you see somebody’s given up for a moment, then they try again and they get it.”
Exactly, said Baylee Connor-Imhoff as she worked through a ball of purple yarn.
“It gets kind of frustrating when I have to start over,” Baylee admitted.
“It feels good once I start getting the hang of it again, and it gets a lot more fun.”
Therapy for the Soul, Exercise for the Mind
Both knitting and yoga emerged from teachers’ concerns about their students’ well-being.
“Last year, we started seeing kids coming to school who were very anxious, very angry,” VanDam said. “We wanted to give them tools to handle their frustrations, and to be able to move forward.”
Maria Kozminski knows about that. She learned to knit after the 2007 murder of her son, Grand Rapids Police Officer Robert Kozminski.
“I started knitting after Bobby was killed. That saved my sanity,” she said as she taught her grandson Ethan Haisma how to cable-stitch. “I’m enjoying teaching a skill that helped me from a bad place. It’s very therapeutic.”
Mary Ann Kubiak helped her grandson Jack make a dish cloth, passing along skills she learned from her mother and grandmother.
Diane Gessner, who used to knit her husband’s socks, looked on as granddaughter Kamryn sat on a desk contentedly twirling the needles.
Back in the hallway, Joy Gibbs worked with a circle of quietly concentrating students. “They’re wonderful, and I see progress,” Gibbs said. “They’ve all done well.”
“You have to be loose in your knitting,” observed Kylee Kimble, who also knits at home. “You will mess up, but you have to try again.”
“We mostly knit because it’s fun,” offered Jayden Williams. “But it also exercises your brain.”