A Wise Showing and Letting Alone

Charlotte Mason taught that teachers were to introduce a feast to children by exposing them to a myriad of subjects and ideas, one of which she called Handicrafts. In this area, she advocated teaching children skills that were used to create beautiful and real things…and that also could be used to help a person earn a living if needed. Like most things, though, she wanted the teacher to show a child how to do something and then get out of the way and let the child take it on for himself, since we learn so much by the doing of something.

In my blog post about my Drama Queens, I mentioned that JitterBug was helping me to hand craft felt puppets for our theater, but that she decided to to her own thing about an hour into it. It has been fun to watch her finish making – not puppets – but little dolls out of the pattern.

After a few weeks, she kept mentioning that she wished that they had included other princesses that she could make and one day she decided that she was just going to make her own designs. She made Meg from Hercules, Rapunzel from Tangled, and Anna and Elsa from Frozen.

Aren’t they so cute?

Now she has designed and begun making characters from the Percy Jackson series. Here is Percy:

All I did was show her the basic stitches and give her access to my felt stash. She spends hours listening to books while sewing. I love it!

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