You gotta get 'em while they're young

This summer has been pretty busy with fiber-related stuff.  Now that things are starting to get cooler, I'm finally finding the time to wind down and actually think about it all, and to actually, you know, wear the stuff that I knit.  Because it would be silly to knit summer things in the summer.  Right?

One thing I did this year was to teach a bunch of kids to knit.  It's my second year volunteering to show kids at a local YMCA summer camp how to knit, and I was a little uncertain.  Last year, there were about 20 kids.  And I had no idea how it should go.  But I'll tell you how it should go: not with 20 kids!  So this year, we split up the groups, and did it over two days instead of one.  On the second day, several kids had gotten their parents to buy them their own yarn and needles, and had worked on their own projects.

This year, the YMCA got the groups each got different supplies for their kids.  One group brought the pull-apart chopsticks you get with Chinese takeout.  The other group brought smooth, round wooden skewers.  The chopsticks were a definite fail; the roughness where they are separated was simply not up to the task of easy knitting!  The skewers worked pretty well, but were super pointy.

Speaking of pointy, one thing I made sure to do beforehand was to come up with a knitting rhyme to help the kids figure out the motions of knitting.  The one I ended up using was:
Under the fence,
Catch the sheep
Back we come,
Off we leap.

The rhyme seemed to work pretty well, but I was sad I couldn't use the one that I find much more clear.  But I figured, without some sort of parental "ok," I'd need to steer clear of homicidal rhymes:
Stab it,
Choke it,
Drag it,
Throw it out.

Much more effective, don't you think?