By Hannah Stewart ’12, Entertainment Section Editor.
Lower School students in afterschool showcased their competitive spirit and collaborative teamwork on February 1st, when they (Abigail Blum ’21, Annabel Blum ’22, Christopher Langenbahn ’22, Maggie Gardner ’21, Oren Conner ’21, Ellie Beyreis
’21) stretched a hand-crocheted ball of yarn almost one and a half times around the school track. Its length of almost 1,980 feet broke the school’s previous record set by Christopher Langenbahn’s sister, Gretchen Langenbahn ’18 last year. Her hand-crocheted ball of yarn stretched from “the Montessori room to outside the door” of the Lower School, which is about half the length of the new record’s, according to Oren Conner.
Abigail Blum has been working on her own hand-crocheted ball of yarn since last year, when Christopher Langenbahn, the brother of the former record-holder, told her of his sister Gretchen’s accomplishment. When Mrs. Michelle Salter, the supervisor of afterschool and a Kindergarten teacher, challenged the afterschoolers to break Gretchen Langenbahn’s record as a team, they took on the task with enthusiasm. Students participating decided to finger-crochet, where “you use just one finger,”
according to Annabel Blum, instead of finger-knitting, where a whole hand is involved, so more students could participate.
The six third and first-graders worked on their ball of yarn for weeks, even during recess, before it had a height of more than ten inches. However, these friends did not consider their project tedious: “We were just talking and having a nice time,” explains Abigail Blum, although Maggie Gardner confesses that her “fingers hurt” after all that crocheting. Their activity interested kindergartners in afterschool, so participants taught the younger students how to finger-knit on their own.
Mrs. Jennifer Aquino, Head of the Lower School, is impressed by the Lower School students: “Their interest in crocheting motivated them to take [the record] further while predicting, problem-solving, and using higher thinking skills.” She notes that 1st and 2nd graders are taught to hand-crochet, because it’s proven that they “learn better when they have something to do with their hands,” due to the “textorial, relaxing nature” of knitting and crocheting.
