American Girl class: Josefina Week 1

We started back to our co-op classes this week on Tuesday, and I am teaching TWO American Girl classes this year, with 21 students! WOW! What a blessing it is to teach these girls!

After we discussed our book, Meet Josefina, our first craft was to make a rebozo or shawl.
Here is a picture of my rebozo:

I was running out of fabric, so I sewed together scraps for a crazy one!

Showing my fringe...

I bought 2 1/2 yards X 2 yard lengths of fabric, one for each girl. (The ladies at Hobby Lobby were so kind to me when I came in 1/2 hour before closing time to cut 50+ yards of fabric!) The fabric had to be woven, not printed. I found a variety of plaids and one striped fabric. During the class, the girls took a straight pin and pulled the threads off of the short ends of the fabric, to make fringe. Most of them thought it was easy, it just took some time. They will need to finish their rebozos at home. When they are done pulling off the threads, they can knot or braid the fringe if they want. I think it will be a fun thing for them to dress up in and wear to our classes! (Hopefully our classroom will be cooler next week, it was quite hot in our room!) Rebozos were worn to protect women from sun, wind and rain. They were also used to carry babies or other items. It could be tied around the waist, around the neck like a scarf, or just laying across your arms, like on the front of our Meet Josefina book.


Our ongoing class project is to weave on a cardboard loom. My amazing hubby and daughter helped me prep the looms and yarn for this craft.

Here is my sample that I made for the class:

I forgot my camera, so I don't have any pictures of the sweet girls in my two classes! :(

This is a great website all about weaving, and there are some instructions that I printed for the girls. (Found under the heading "Weaving tips for Elementary" and "Now here is what the children do.")

I made the cardboard looms 6 x 6" square, and I cut slits across one end (with the grain of the corrugated cardboard). Then I threaded two different colors of crochet thread through the slits. This will make it easier (esp. for the younger girls) to thread through the warp threads with their weft threads (weft threads go right and weft, haha!) I also brought popsicle sticks for them to push up on the yarn after they threaded it through the crochet threads.

The girls really liked the craft, and most of them thought the weaving was easy. We will be working on the weaving project again over the next five weeks in class.

We had corn tortillas for snack, and most of the girls kinda liked them. I should have had the moms bring sour cream or salsa to go on them, but I forgot to ask! Oops! The moms bought the tortillas at the store, since we don't have time to make the snacks during our one-hour class. Here is a recipe that I found to make corn tortillas.

It was a fun first day! There was a lot of prep work for this week, but it was worth it, I love working with each and every girl! They make me smile a lot!