Crochet Tutorials

Here are some of the crochet tutorials if you would like to watch them and practise at home.

You might have to watch them several times to understand what is happening.  You will also have to practise a lot before it becomes something you can do easily.  How many times did you fall down when learning to walk? How many times did you fall off when learning to ride a bike? Remember this is a new skill you are learning and it is not an easy skill to learn.

The slipknot and chain stitch is how you start when you crochet.

The single crochet is the main stitch that we will be using for our patterns. Watch this for the first 2 minutes 50 seconds. The turn at the end of the row after this time is useful if you are going to be doing a placemat or square coaster.

What's going on in this picture?

I have been asking you lots of questions around giving me more details either when answering questions in reading, or when writing your setting and character descriptions. To practise finding details, look at the picture below and answer these three questions.   

What is going on in this picture?

What do you see that makes you say that?

What more can you find?

Write your answers in the comments, write in full sentences, think about Who, What, Where, Why, How details and tell me as much as possible. You can also respectfully comment on, or refer to, other people’s answers. You might agree with them and add more detail to support their answers or you might have another opinion that you can support with other reasons. 

Who is in the picture? What are they doing? What are they feeling? Where are they going? Where have they been? Why are they going there? Why had they been there? Why are they feeling that way? How did this happen? Don't forget your conjunction "BECAUSE". I think they are going away from the beach because ... (including evidence from the picture).

For example, Bob might say he thinks these people are happy to be here because they appear to be walking casually, Sarah might say she thinks they are unhappy because they are all bowing their heads, looking at the ground. As long as you can justify your comments, there are no wrong answers. This is a details finding exercise.

The actual caption was:

Swimmers walked across a beach covered by seaweed in Qingdao, in eastern China. Beaches in Qingdao have been plagued by seaweed from the Yellow Sea the last several summers.

The Times reports about the algae bloom in this article, writing: 

In what has become an annual summer scourge, the coastal Chinese city of Qingdao has been hit by a near-record algae bloom that has left its popular beaches fouled with a green, stringy muck.

The State Oceanic Administration said an area larger than Connecticut had been affected by the mat of “sea lettuce,” as it is known in Chinese, which is generally harmless to humans but chokes off marine life and invariably chases away tourists as it begins to rot.

Some beachgoers appeared to be amused by the outbreak, at least according to the Chinese news media, which in recent days have featured images of swimmers lounging on bright green beds of algae, tossing it around with glee or piling it atop of one another as if it were sand.

Local officials, however, are less enthusiastic.