Here are some things to keep in mind when coaching your friends:
- Remember how you learned: Did the needles slip right out of your hand, dropping all the stitches? Did your grandmother have to hold your hands and walk you through a knit stitch? Keeping in mind the frustrations of learning a new skill when teaching. To experienced knitters, we forget what is was like when the yarn and needles felt awkward in our hands.
- Be patient: Keeping these things in mind will help you keep your patience. Learning to knit can be frustrating but nothing is worse than when the teacher becomes impatient with the student.
- Visuals: No matter how many times you explain how to twist the yarn around the needle, almost no one truly gets it until they see it about five times. Be prepared to show your student over and over again.
- Repetition: Not only will they need to see you do it over and over again, but they will need to repeat the stitches many times to really get the hang of it.
- Encouragement: Being positive and encouraging makes knitting fun and will make the student feel as though they are doing well which makes them want to do more. Knitting is a stress-reliever and presenting it as anything else in a beginning lesson is doing the student a disservice.
- Success: It’s important to newbies to feel as though they are accomplishing something. Often, a persons first project is a scarf. I don’t like this because I find scarves long and boring and I see many a beginners ditch their scarves half way through. Squares that could be sewn into something bigger later is a much better beginning project because it gives the student a finished product quicker.
