Hi there, I'm Sarah Baldwin and it's another "Sunday with Sarah." It's been a
long time since I've recorded a video for you, had a busy few months getting
ready for the holidays. So, speaking of the holidays I wanted to share with
you today
one of my very favorite stocking stuffers.
It's something you're probably really familiar with, just a simple finger
string for playing finger games or cat's cradle, if you remember that from your
childhood.
So this is my friend Benjamin, and a couple weeks ago
Benjamin was visiting our shop and I gave him a finger string like this — this is
from Sarah's Silks, its rainbow colored, really pretty — and at first he didn't
know what to do with it and I showed him just the very simplest cat's cradle game
and I want to show you what what he can do now.
We'll play it together, shall we? Ok, you're going to start.
can you get a little bit closer to me
Let's see how many rounds we can go.
Tada! Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you, Benjamin. So that game I just played with Benjamin
is the most well-known string game called Cat's Cradle and you probably
played it as a child but there are many, many other games, string games, that can
be played. String games are wonderful, not just for fun, but also it's a
great learning tool.
It's great for developing a child's fine motor skills which we now know are so
important for brain development and learning. It's for this reason we
introduce activities like finger knitting in the Waldorf kindergarten and
all children learn to knit in first grade and to do handwork and embroidery.
All those skills with the fingers are directly connected, there are nerves going
right from the tips of the fingers to neural pathways in the brain.
Finger string games have also been found to be really effective for children with
dyslexia and other learning disabilities.
They help develop motor agility and literacy and numeracy skills but kids
just know that it's fun. It's a great thing to just keep a finger
string in your bag, wonderful for long car trips or long airplane trips to keep
children occupied for great lengths of time. I also wanted to tell you about
this wonderful book, Finger Strings by Michael Taylor who's a Waldorf teacher who
loves these games, has collected many of them from different cultures. Games for
children from as young as five,
Cat's Cradle that you saw is probably better for children eight or nine and up,
but they're simple games in here that even a five-year-old can enjoy. It comes
with two extra finger strings in the back, one yellow and one red, and the
illustrations are kind of color coded to make it really easy to understand each
move. There are even games for multiple players. So I highly recommend this book
if you're new to string games. And again, it's one of my favorite stocking stuffers, a best
seller at Christmas time here at Bella Luna Toys. Anyway, I hope that has
inspired you to pick up a string! So thanks again for tuning in.
Glad to be back with you, I promise to not be such a stranger.
You'll see me again soon on "Sunday with Sarah." Thanks so much, bye-bye.