stART–The Name Quilt

This was a great project that tied in so well with our last letter unit! Our last theme was Q is for Quilt, so I checked out a bunch of books from the library about quilts. My daughter’s favorite was The Name Quilt. The story is about a granddaughter who stays with her grandma every summer. The grandma has a patchwork quilt with names embroidered on each square, and each name has a story to go with it. The little girl asks her grandma about each one as she’s there. Then the name quilt gets blown away in a storm, and they are both very sad about it being gone. They decide to make a new one, including all the names from before and adding the granddaughter too.

Kahlen asked me when we would make our own name quilt. Now, I am *not* a quilter, too much detail work for me, BUT I still came up with a great project for us to do: a paper name quilt!

Supplies Needed:

• Poster board
• scrapbooking paper
• white cardstock
• picture of each person
• glue stick or double-sided tape or both
• scissors or paper cutter

First, we came up with a list of 19 family members plus her made 20. I found a picture for each person and printed it on plain paper 3”x3” while she wrote their names on white cardstock squares cut to 4.25” x 4.25”. The writing was done in several shifts because that’s a lot of writing for a 4-year-old! She did great, though, and was very careful with each person’s name (I either spelled them out loud, or wrote them on a scrap paper for her).

Then she glued the picture to the correct white card. I collated them for her, but we could have made this a reading exercise too. Those had to dry because I let her use the glue stick all by her self…

Next, I cut the scrapbook paper into 6” x 6” squares. I let her arrange them on the poster board before gluing them down (I used scrapbooking double-sided tape, so I did that part). Then we laid out the people before gluing them on. I was being a little picky about this part and putting the pictures with the people they belonged with (like not putting my sister-in-law next to my dad), but if you aren’t picky that way, then she could have done that part too.

We taped all the people on and hung it up above her bed. Then we talked about how she can think about all her family now and pray for them anytime she thinks about them. She’s very proud of her work, as well she should be!

 

~S