Beading Wrap-up

Today we finished our week of beading. We have gone through the steps of learning a new skills, struggling and figuring it out, making progress, helping each other, celebrating accomplishments, and reflecting on how far we’ve come in a week. These are all skills that apply to math class as well, along with all the emotional regulation skills we used to keep our mindset good while we were working as to not put any negative energy into our work. We learned how to notice our emotions, find a strategy to use to regulate, and then to return once we were calm and ready. We will be putting all of those skills to use as we move into the challenges of lap 3 of our course.

The final steps of the beading involve weaving threads to create a tab of fabric to glue the finishing leather to.

Next we applied glue to the strings so they would stay bonded together

Then we cut the work from the loom and used leather glue to glue the hide to the ends to finish the keychain.

We’ve got many finished pieces resting on the windowsill, while we work on our writeup that explains all the math in our work.

We can talk about the number of beads we used, and how we can calculate that with our strategies. We can determine the fraction of beads of a certain colour, or we could report that as a percentage. We can discuss symmetry, reflection, translation, rotation, various shapes or angles, areas and perimeters. We could talk about repeating patterns, or growing patterns and use proportional reasoning. If 1 motif takes 5 red beads, then 3 motifs would take 15 red beads. Some students thought of the math first and planned their beading accordingly, and others are starting with the art, and developing the math later.

We are also reflecting on the learning skills and emotional regulation skills we learned, as well as the teachings and connections to Indigenous ways of knowing and understanding pattern and math.