Team Gray!

My etsy shop is not doing as well as I’d hoped. I wondered if maybe I was a little disingenuous with my shop name: kzoomoo’s knittin kittens, seeing as how I didn’t have one knit item in the shop.

It’s not like I don’t knit. I just got into a crocheting binge, and explored it to its natural conclusion. I haven’t listed all the crocheted items I created for the shop; I’d hoped to move those I did list, first.

But it was nagging me that I hadn’t knit anything for the shop. I’m sure there’s some mystical social media explanation for poor sales, but, hey! Knitting! Such a cozy activity for this time of year.

No matter that I still didn’t feel like putting up the crochet hook just yet.

I started with what I had in my hand. There was some leftover yarn from my mother. It’s the kind of three color blend that I would never pick out myself. I much prefer solid colors. There was also some leftover pink eyelash yarn from Yanni’s crafting days.

So I tested the knitting water with a scarf combining these two yarns. I chose the basket-weave stitch, because I prefer to knit in texture than just plain stockinette .

I liked the project enough to invest in more yarn after my existing stores started to dwindle. I couldn’t find an exact color match, though–a danger of using old yarn.

But the colors are close, certainly complimentary. I don’t know if I’ll sell the scarf. But it was a fun dive back into knitting.

Meanwhile, I started a hat for….one of my girls. I knew Chanya needed a hat, but it turned out, Joy really wanted one. So I used the same yarn and stitch to create a Joy-sized hat. It’s been a minute since I knit a hat, and I couldn’t find the round needles, so I wasn’t sure how the hat would turn out.

I finished Joy’s hat today. She loves it, so that’s important. I have yarn leftover, so I’ve started a hat for Chanya, too, this time in a different stitch. More on her hat later. Here’s Joy modeling the hat and scarf:

Can you even see a pattern in the stiches? Or is that multi-colored yarn too distracting? I don’t know. Maybe I should have put ‘crochet’ in the title of my etsy shop?

I mentioned before that I like to draw the children each week in my lesson plan book. The pictures serve both to label which child each individual plan is about and to improve my drawing skills.

I posted last week’s best picture on Facebook, and I got good feedback on it.

This week, I’ve drawn everyone except Chanya, the subject of last week’s best portrait. I am torn between Joy and Esteban’s portraits. Which do you think is better?

Today, Esteban’s math script introduced geoboards. Mind you, as a second grader, this is the third year he’s worked with geoboards, so I skipped over the script.

But we got into some new territory, like the mathematical term for a corner in a shape–an angle.

It went something like this:

“Blah, blah, blah, mathematicians call corners in shapes angles. How many angles are in a triangle?”

“3.”

“Hence the name, triangle.”

The children are giggling.

“Does rectangle mean four angles?”

“I’m not sure about that. I’ll have to look that up. But what about a square? Or a trapezoid, or a rhombus…or a parallelogram? How many sides do all these shapes have?”

“4.”
Esteban stretches a ‘geoband’ (sturdy, colorful rubber band) on his board into the shape of a square.

“How do you know it’s a square?” I ask.

“Because it looks like one.”

“What makes it look like a square?”

Imani and Joy know the answer. They are bursting at the seams.

I make a rectangle on the geoboard. “How are rectangles and squares different?”

“Their sides are longer.”

I change the rectangle so that the sides are narrower but taller.

“What makes a rectangle different from a square?”

Esteban tries to gesture shapes with his fingers. “Use words,” I tell him.

I make a trapezoid. “How is the trapezoid different from the square?”

“The sides are different.”

“How? How do you know a rectangle and a square?”

“Because 2 of the sides of the rectangle are the same, and the square has all 4 sides the same.”

The room let out a collective sigh.