American Girl class: Addy Week 6

This week in our American Girl class, we discussed book 6 in the Addy series, Changes for Addy. We talked about the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War. You can find a copy of it here. We also made Spool Puppets, since we couldn't make them last week.

Here are some basic directions: (I found these online here)

1. With an approx. 2-yard piece of yarn use clear tape to make one end stiff like a shoestring for threading.
2. Knot a pony bead onto the non-taped end of the yarn. Then thread on 4 spools and tie a pony bead on the other end.  You need to leave a 3 inch piece of yarn in the middle of the 4 spools so you have something to tie onto for the next step. (Cut off the excess to be used in the next step.)
3. Now fold the string in half so the knots become the feet and the spools the legs.  You should have a yarn U in the middle facing down. Tie your yarn around the middle of the yarn U and thread on one more spool.  Push the spool down toward the legs.  Hopefully you now have a little loop sticking out of the top half of the body.  
4. Take another piece of yarn about yard long.  Then put on 1 spool for an arm, thread through the loop and put on the other spool. Now take the ends of these pieces and double-knot to the dowel rod you are using to control the puppet.  Tie the arms on as near to the ends of the dowel rod as you can.  
5. Now tie one more piece onto the loop (Unless you didn’t cut the piece off from attaching the body,  then you can use that.) and put on one more spool for the head.  Push the head down so it sits between the arms. (This is when it will finally look like a puppet!) Take this piece of yarn straight up and tie to the middle of the dowel rod.  

Note: You will just have to play with it if you want to make these.  We used 8 spools per girl, one 12" dowel and yarn. Then the girls used markers to decorate them however they wanted.

Here is the 1:00 class...

A completed one on the table...

The spools were hard for me to find, I went to two craft stores for them. I ordered the spools over two weeks ago (since I needed over 150) and they barely made it in time-- an hour and a half before my classes began! Schwoo! It was worth the hunt!

They were a little complicated to make, and some of the girls thought they were "hard". I hope everyone got their spool puppets made. I know some girls didn't get them colored, but I figured that they could do that at home.

 The 2:00 class...

Eating snack while working...

Bummer this is blurry- her doll was cute!

For snack, we had Mock Apple Pie, you can find the recipe here.

It was another fun class day, it went by so quickly! Next week we will begin Samantha-- already halfway through the class! We've enjoyed the Addy books a lot, kinda sad to be done...