Quilts for Play and Learning

Several years ago when I was a full-time kindergarten teacher, I came up with an idea. I had several classroom volunteers, and what I really needed them to do was spend some one-on-one time with individual students to promote listening skills and teach basic readiness concepts. I needed a tool, a game, something to use to accomplish this task. I had made classroom quilts with my classes for years. The children were drawn to them and they loved talking about the pictures on the quilts. (When the children and I made quilts, I used their artwork as the squares.) This would be different. First, I
became a collector of conversational quilt fabrics - it's absolutely amazing what you can find on fabric these days! Then a found a quilting book that I loved - Picture Play Quilts - it's still available. It was full of ideas including directions for about 10 games to play with each quilt. I was ready to roll. The best part was that quilts didn't have to be perfect . . . just bright and engaging for the children. I had a ball playing with stitches on my Viking that I wasn't brave enough to try on other things.

I combined photos of the children and conversational prints to make the contents of each quilt as interesting as possible. On each quilt I tried to include blocks that could be used for picture, letter and numeral identification, counting and finding pictures that began nor ended in certain sounds. The quilts can be used at the earliest age just finding things . . "do you see the butterfly?" . . ."point to the butterfly" . . . and later "find something that has wings" . . . "find something that begins with B". The real fun starts when the child is able to use their verbal skills and become the "teacher". My volunteers enjoyed having something special to do and the children responded positively to the one-on-one attention, learning things daily from our look and learn quilts. Just think how much fun parents and grandparents could have with their grandchildren and one of these quilts.
When my cousin's grand child was born, I decided to make a special quilt for her. On this one I made 49 snowball blocks using Steam a Seam II to place the pictures before I stitched them to the blocks. The blocks alternated on each row - every other picture was a family member - the others were conversational prints.

I'm getting ready to start Suzi's first quilt. I think I'll pull out all my conversational fabrics, sit her in the middle of them and see which ones she's drawn to. We're going to have a great day!