New Skills of Self Reliance (Exit 4)

My seven strand braid, closed at either end by
ropes made by Jason S. To the right is another
braid made by JJ and Jason L.

Today's class in the garden was another good one, luckily the rain has still held off! Spending time learning a new skill and working with our hands together in such a lovely space really brought out the creativity in everyone. I particularly love the idea of relying less on the industrial world for our necessities. I'm currently imagining future me making a rope long enough for a clothes line out of material harvested from the land it will be used on. How awesome that would be! Using it would be a constant reminder of what our world could be. Thinking about how easily most of us got caught up in braiding and spinning and plying, I wonder if most kids of today would get interested with as little required of the instructor. If I implement this activity with a class of teenagers, what will they get from it? How can I get them to engage deeply with the process? Especially if they are not used to the outdoors. In another class someone told a story about a math teacher they had in high school who condensed the content down to four days of the week and spent every Friday teaching a life skill. I would love to implement something like this, maybe once a month. This way perhaps I wouldn't need to make a direct content connection. Although, a physics connection is easy! I could hold a contest to see which team or individual can make the strongest rope. Of course this would require some kind of force test. We could even test how doubling the number of strands effects the strength. Extend this to using the rope on some pulleys and you can show that it is very likely to break at the pully due to the bending of the fibers, and a smaller pulley will cause the rope to be more likely to break. Lots of awesome opportunities.

For whatever reason, the paint chip activity didn't speak to me as much. I sort of felt limited and was trying to find specific colours in nature that matched these colours I had chosen, instead of just admiring the natural colours the way they are. Maybe I could have reframed it in another way. I did still enjoy it, but so far I have found the sound activity the most engaging.