Cabin Crafted

Tag: learning

  • An Educator

    This is teacher appeciation week. Thank a teacher for the impact they had on you or your child. For 43 years, I was an educator, retiring when I could begin to collect Social Security. For a few years after retirement, the only teaching I did was helping a local summer camp, teaching some spinning, weaving, and salve making. Then a friend who had been volunteering at a local museum couldn’t fulfill a day they needed a spinner and I connected with a volunteer activity that allowed me to demonstrate in a Colonial historical context, fiber arts. The program director at that museum moved to a different location, a little farther from our farm, but still under an hour to get there and I followed her, volunteering at events, and as she developed a program and relationship with the area school districts, as a teaching volunteer.

    Generally, I am in a 1769 log, 10 by 10 foot cabin that houses a great wheel and a barn loom.

    We have classes from second grade, fourth grade, and sixth grade that visit the museum at different times of the year. In my usual role, I am teaching about fiber production, processing, and clothing on the frontier. The village was chartered in 1810, so still very early in our country’s history, and through a period where trade was virtually stopped due to the Revolutionary War, and limited after the war due to the distance from the coastal trade ports.

    Today, a very rainy day, we had about 60 second graders visiting. And a different hat as one of our volunteers was unavailable, I was in the old separate kitchen talking about household life and how different it was then compared to what the kids experience today. The limitation of types of food, as most of what we eat now is imported or hybridized versions of what a local in western Virginia would have had available as well as the difficulty of storage, cooking on a fireplace, the soap making, candle making, fiber growth and processing, and how it was mostly a cashless society with bartering the most common form of trade.

    I may be a very senior citizen, but teaching is still in my blood and I love the volunteer opportunity that is there for me. I hope to be able to continue doing this for many more years.

  • Easy Rider

    Many, many years ago, I could be seen running madly down the street hanging on to the seat of one of our children’s bicycles until they achieved the balance and confidence to ride away on their own. I am clearly not that young any more.   Eldest grandson, living in an apartment on a hilly parking lot in a busy city has been reluctant to learn to ride.  He rides with his Dad on the tandem bike, in fact they go many miles to Kung Fu each Saturday, rain or shine and often a couple of miles to guitar lessons on Friday evening with the guitar strapped to his Dad’s back.

    Since he is with us for a good portion of this summer and since we are taking him with us to visit his 7 year old cousin in Florida, we brought his bike to the mountains for some lessons on riding before the Florida trip.  He has been here a week now and today, since hubby is off on his motorcycle, I decided it was a good day for a bicycle lesson.  L was quite reluctant.  The school counselor in me acknowledged that he was afraid, but insisted that together we could overcome that fear.  Off to the local elementary school we went, as they have a nice flat road and parking area and several gently sloping grassy hills down to water retention depressions.  When we got there, he was very oppositional about even trying, but I was as stubborn that he was going to give it a go, a bit of bribery thrown in for good measure.  I ran behind him, helping to keep him balanced until I couldn’t catch my breath and decided that the gentle grassy slopes might provide a good place to practice balance.

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    This gave me a chance to breath as well.  He would coast down the hill and walk the bike back up.  Once his balance was better, we resumed the running behind a few more times, but by then I didn’t have to hold the seat and handlebars, just the seat.  He is definitely getting it.  A couple more times of this and he will ride away from me on his own, a new skill learned.  I could see the confidence in his face after today’s session and I doubt that we will have anymore reluctance to try.