By Rod Hansen
Staff Writer

Alex Thibodeau, 9, practices some stitching during the class. (The Goffstown News/Bruce Preston)

A recent quilting demonstration at Center Woods Elementary School shows how the Weare school is trying to bring real-world expertise into the classroom environment.

Lynn Hanna, a local quilter, parent and substitute teacher, visited the third-grade classroom of Linda Gosselin to demonstrate her craft in a 45-minute lesson.

The lesson came as part of Weare’s Community Resources in the Classroom program, in which community volunteers talk to local students about their hobbies and professions.

“This is the perfect way to bring firsthand knowledge to the students,” Gosselin said, as Hanna led students through an exercise in which the children learned to thread a needle and piece together scraps for a quilt.

Gosselin noted the class is currently studying quilting as part of the “Keeping Traditions” theme in their reading program. With students reading books such as “The Keeping Quilt,” and learning vocabulary words including “threading,” an in-classroom quilting demonstration gives students a primary example of how the craft is done, Gosselin said.

“It’s one thing to read about quilting and threading, but there’s nothing like doing it for yourself,” Gosselin said.

Hanna’s presentation also familiarized students with some of the tools of the quilting trade. Carrying in a portable sewing machine, Hanna told the class how a computer program within the sewing machine was able to stitch a picture of a skeleton drawn by her fourth-grade son, Matthew, by simply scanning in the drawing.

The 20 students in Gosselin’s class took quickly to Hanna’s presentation, and adapted to threading their needles without a single stuck finger in the process.

“It’s a lot of fun for the kids, and I like doing stuff like this,” said Hanna, a Weare resident and president of the Weare Piecemakers Quilt Guild.

Hanna is the second community volunteer to appear in Gosselin’s classroom this year. Pamela Castle, a teacher at Weare Middle School and published poet, gave students a lesson on how to write and publish a poem and concluded with students writing a poem of their own.

Weare schools encourage volunteers of many interests and professions to visit classrooms as part of the Community Resources in the Classroom program, Gosselin said.

A volunteer sheet distributed by the program asks people in fields ranging from actors and actresses to woodworkers, with areas in between including colonial historians, illustrators and veterans.

Anyone interested in learning more about the program can contact school board member Judy Lamont at 529-7922.