Cotton

It's nice to have a list of resources for each fiber in the Waldorf grade 3 Fibers & Clothing block (which we did in Feb 2019 and again in Sep 2024).

Feb 2019 posts

• Fibers & Clothing Week 1
  Wool Experiments, Washing Molly's Raw Wool, Carding & Spinning, Wet Felting
• Fibers & Clothing Week 2
  Natural Dyes, Mohair & Cashmere, Yarn Store Field Trip, Silk, Crochet Special Guest
• Fibers & Clothing Week 3
  Weaving, Angora, Camel, Spinning Special Guest, Flax & Hemp, Hemp & Indigo Field Trip
• Finishing Up Fibers & Clothing
  Cotton Special Guest, Alpaca Farm Field Trip

I've now amassed quite a few resources specifically for teaching about Cotton!! Here's what I want to remember for the next time I do this block:

Growing

Cotton by Millicent E. Selsam

A Beetle Is Shy by Dianna Hutts Aston (boll weevil illustration)




boll weevil background information

boll weevil song / poster

field trip / special guest options: Blayne, Bridget, Master Gardeners (there's a patch growing at the One-Room Schoolhouse by John A)

Sep 14, 2024

The children want to grow a patch of cotton in my yard next spring!

Picking

cotton bolls for the children to examine, in various stages of opening

special guest Ms. Grace

Sep 25, 2024

Ms. Grace was born in Louisiana in 1950 and helped out in her family's cotton fields from the age of 4. This year she brought us some cotton plants from a neighbor's field in Wolf Lake IL!



She demonstrated to the children how people would use this old scale to measure the weight of their handpicked bags of cotton before throwing the cotton into the back of the wagon.

Ms. Grace also spoke fondly of singing her babies to sleep with the CCR song, Cotton Fields.


One of the families in our group drove by the Wolf Lake cotton fields later and took a picture of the harvested cotton (called modules)!

Oct 15, 2024
Oct 19, 2024
a cotton module ready for the gin
machinery at work in the fields

Ginning

pull all of the seeds out of one cotton boll and count them

(one student planted her cotton seed at home, and it began to grow!)

Oct 6, 2024


Eli Whitney by Jean Lee Latham

page 14 of Cotton by Millicent E. Selsam

excerpt from The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly (Chapter 15, " A Sea of Cotton") which takes place in 1899

special guest from Black Sheep Fiber Guild

Spinning

spinning cotton fiber straight off a cotton seed (activity from my Waldorf Handwork Teacher Training at the Fiber Craft Studio in NY)


Jul 15, 2021


sample of thick & thin handspun cotton from Hilary Chandler

This post contains affiliate links to materials I truly use for homeschooling. Qualifying purchases provide me with revenue. Thank you for your support!