Endless chatter and bursts of laughter stream far out of Room 215 each Monday afternoon at Aurora’s Challenge School, where it sounds like students might be teaming up on learning the newest TikTok dance or solidifying plans for spring break.
Instead, these elementary and middle schoolers sit in clusters surrounded by bright spools of yarn, which they’re furiously crafting into tiny hats and blankets while reviving the art of crochet.
Their teacher: 13-year-old Alexandra Schmidt, who started the crochet club at the Cherry Creek magnet school that has drawn a couple dozen of her peers. Nine students showed up to the club’s first meeting in the fall. Since then, close to 30 kids have learned how to crochet.
“It just really makes me so happy to be able to provide this service for the kids to let them unleash their creativity and do things with their hands,” Alexandra, an eighth grader, said.
The club has become a wildly popular after-school activity at the K-8 school of more than 560 students, with teens and preteens setting aside their screens and pausing social media to pick up crochet hooks and challenge themselves to fasten yarn into pint-sized pieces of clothing. The weekly club meetings insulate students from the ever-growing pressures of school and the never-ending noise that comes with navigating childhood in an age of technology. For one hour at the start of each week, students can exhale as they settle into an antiquated hobby-turned-top-trend.
The hats and blankets they create inside the classroom and continue working on at home ultimately land in a donation pile that Alexandra and her mom take to the Denver Health Foundation to gift to the Newborns in Need program. In December, the club gave 20 hats to the program, which sends every family who gives birth at Denver Health or adopts a baby home with what’s called “a warm welcome bag” containing a variety of essentials, including diapers, wipes, blankets, clothes, a bib, hats and socks.
The bags set up babies for a healthy start in life, said Sharon Mushkin, program coordinator for Newborns in Need, which last year equipped families of more than 3,800 babies with necessities. Challenge School students are helping families have access to the basics they need at a time many have to pick between buying food, diapers or clothes, Mushkin said.
“It’s so important for kids to learn very young how important it is to give back, especially for those of us that are able,” she said. “And there are so many people out there that need assistance.”
Alexandra launched the club in October, turning a skill she picked up and polished during the isolating days of the pandemic into a craze that has swept through her school. She has mastered a long list of crochet projects, including scarves, beanies and amigurumi — small stuffed yarn animals and toys.
“My drive to crochet comes in big spurts, and then I simmer down,” she said.
She formed the crochet club as a way to pass on her passion for fabric arts to classmates and also do something meaningful for her community. She and her mom, Tung Chan, who helps run the club, expected no more than a handful of students to attend the first meeting. Now, about 20 students regularly fit the crochet club into their week, and it has built up a bigger following than the mother-daughter pair ever anticipated.
“It’s taken off and seems to have a real place in these kids’ lives now,” Chan said.
“An hour of productive joy”
Chan has watched as crocheting has given her daughter a lasting sense of purpose, particularly after it brightened the bleak days of the pandemic.
“It was an outlet where she could be creative and expressive, and it had a physical result so she had a toy at the end,” Chan said. “It was such a hard time, and something so beautiful came out of it.”
With a history of dabbling in knitting, Chan learned how to crochet alongside Alexandra. It didn’t take long for her daughter to outpace her with yarn and crochet hooks in hand.
While Alexandra teaches her classmates how to work with their crochet sticks, her mom buys the colorful array of yarn. It’s nothing new for parents and teachers to pitch in with supplies and snacks and pay other expenses so that kids have a free activity after school.
Across most schools, an adult sponsor must oversee clubs, so extracurriculars need teachers, volunteers or parents who will step up “to provide a little structure and support,” Rebecca Holmes, president and CEO of the nonprofit Colorado Education Initiative, wrote in an email to The Colorado Sun.
Their efforts go a long way in rounding out a child’s education, Holmes wrote, noting that research shows that kids who participate in extracurricular activities have better attendance and grades and graduate at higher rates.
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“For so many kids, an extracurricular club, just like a sport, can serve an important role as the best part of their day or just a part of their day where they get to engage and show up differently than they otherwise might in a more traditional academic setting,” she said.
Now, Alexandra floats from student to student during crochet club meetings, answering their questions, helping them get unstuck and teaching them how to avoid the same mistakes. One of her students is her own teacher, Amanda Escheman, who serves as the club’s sponsor and is slowly piecing together a dark teal blanket.
“Did I screw it up again?” she asked Alexandra during a moment of confusion and frustration during a recent Monday meeting.
“No, I think you’re doing great,” Alexandra responded.
“Well, it’s a start,” Escheman said. “It’s something.”
Escheman, a humanities teacher at Challenge School, said the club has molded Alexandra into a take-charge leader, someone far bolder than the quiet student she usually is during class. The educator often sits with her students as they all struggle to coordinate their crochet hooks. Some kids catch up with friends, balls of yarn gathered on all sides of them, while others tune out the conversations around them to focus solely on their hats and blankets, even as the classroom volume dials up to a near-rowdy level.
“It’s an hour of productive joy,” Escheman said.
Students like Nobel Woldu and Amy Ong have caught onto that sense of joy while each progressing through a blanket for a baby in need.
Nobel, an eighth grader, has also sped her way through five hats and no longer needs much help from her mom or Alexandra. Through the crochet club, she’s built up her independence and found that making something with her hands helps her relax.
“It feels refreshing after being online so long,” she said while crocheting a pink hat.
Amy, a sixth grader, is about halfway through crocheting a blue-and-pink blanket and has continued despite challenges perfecting more advanced types of stitches.
“It’s complex when you first think about it,” Amy said, “but after a lot of practice, it becomes mostly muscle memory.”
The new tween and teen frenzy over crocheting has led to a schoolwide renaissance for the fabric arts, a “nurturing” artform that Chan said has been “sidelined in ways they don’t deserve to be.”
“You see all these toys or sweaters and then you do it and (you see) you can make these things,” she said, describing crocheting as a skill kids “can carry with them forever.”
Meanwhile, Escheman has still managed to teach students one lesson during club meetings even while being a student herself.
She often stumbles her way through each step of crocheting.
“It’s a chance for me to sit back and be like, I don’t have all the answers here,” Escheman said. “I’m not perfect at everything.”
“I’m sure for them it’s good to see your teacher as a human,” she added. “Your teacher is a human. That was the lesson all along.”