I think we homeschooling parents are often shocked by what we consider to be gaps in our kids' educations, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. I'm saying this tongue in cheek, here, but there is an element of truth to it. All kids have gaps in their educations because it's physically impossible to teach someone every aspect of human knowledge. Darn kids. Why can't they just absorb ALL the information by osmosis?
So, we were diligently working on our Writing & Rhetoric book, and discussing the story of Arachne and Athena, where Athena gets angry at Arachnes's depiction of the Greek gods acting like jackasses, and smashes Arachne's loom with the shuttle. It didn't take much discussion to realize that my boys had no basic knowledge of how a loom worked, let alone the components of a loom. Therefore, they didn't have as deep an understanding of the story as they should have.
As we often do, we took a pause from the writing program, and took a little tangent to learn about looms and weaving. We watched a couple videos of people working looms, we looked at diagrams of loom parts and we talked about what kinds of things were made on looms. Then, I had the kids do some weaving of paper strips, so that they would understand how threads can be interwoven to make fabric. This was a time consuming project for them, but they enjoyed seeing the progression of their work. With a little help, Andrew even turned his weaving into an Easter basket.
