Peg Board Sewing

The Question

What do you do when you want to teach the lesson about Dorcas to your Littles and you want to have a sewing type activity but you know they can’t do it? You modify of course.

How We Modified

We know our younger children can’t do lacing activities like the four and five year old children can, but I really wanted us to do some sewing type activities. So we got busy on the modifications. Remember, young children are growing their finger muscles, so sometimes we just need to be creative.

First, I got a tunic design off the internet from Bible Fun for Kids that had holes around it and used my Word Processing shape tools to cover up some of the holes so that we would only punch out a few of those holes on a printed cardstock tunic. When the children came to class, they colored their tunics and with adult help, they laced around the edge.

Young children cannot lace beads onto lacing strings, so when they finished, they laced a peg board that Mr. D made me. He made enough for each child in my class. He drilled a small hole in sanded square wood blocks. He added a smoothed dowel rod and glued it in place. The children then threaded on beads to the rod after it had time to thoroughly dry. They did this task numerous times. Note: These pegboards are only played with while the child is sitting calmly in a chair. Now, when we talked about sewing the children had an idea about what that means.