Peg Dolls

As part of of my teaching degree, we had to go to an excursion venue and then make a presentation about it in a little Expo at uni.

We chose Sovereign Hill and headed out there, it was a fantastic day filled with heaps of cool things to do and see. For those of you who don't know, Sovereign Hill is a small historic village constructed entirely to mimic the goldrush times in rural Victoria. If you ever have the chance to check it out, do so! There were a number of old and beautiful crafts on display including knitting, quilt making, embroidery, blacksmithing and more.

When we were putting together our display for the expo, I decided I wanted to make a little craft station where people could make peg dolls. I remember making them when I was small, and about half the students remembered them too, so it was a great nostalgic thing to do. A couple of students who swore they couldnt sew to save themselves had a go and were really pleased with the results!

This is the writeup that went with the activity:

Toys and games in the past

The tradition of making dolls out of wooden clothes pegs comes from a time when most families had little money to spend on things like toys. During the 19^th Century, peg dolls were very popular, even among the rich. One of the best-known collections of these belonged to the young Queen Victoria, but because they were relatively cheap, they were well within the reach of even the poorest families. Remnant shops often sold fabric scraps which were sometimes a floral design, or off cuts from curtains, rolled into bundles and sold for 1/2d. These scraps were then lovingly sewn by hand by the children into clothing for their peg dolls. Some families made them into peddler dolls adding little trinkets to the finished doll and sold them for pennies on the street.

Suggested activity: Make a peg doll

You will need:

• A wooden 'dolly' type peg
• A pipe cleaner
• Scraps of material and wool
• Scissors, glue, sharpie pens

Wind the middle of pipe cleaner a few times around the peg just below the 'neck'. Bend out the two ends to make arms, and twist the ends under to make hands. Wrap the material around the peg to make clothing and glue down. Glue the wool on for hair and draw a face with the sharpies.

This can be done as part of a 'history of toys' lesson, or a 'clothing of the past' lesson or simply a fun activity during the goldmining unit.

Below is three peg dolls made during the expo. You have a serving girl to the left, a convict man in the middle and a lady to the right. All in all a fun and highly successful activity to do!

Teaching the young

So yesterday was my second day of doing a Grad Dip in Primary School Teaching. I want to become an art teacher for kids. I'm really looking forward to it, every time they talk to us about curriculum in the lectures, my eyes widen at the thought of teaching this to children. I love it! I love the idea of helping them learn all of these subjects. But closet to my heart is art.

The Grad Dip is a general course, teaching the 100 or so students how to be a regular Primary School teacher, teaching all the usual subjects, maths, English, science, humanities, so I figure that I just have to do some extra curricular studies to keep pace with what I'm learning but from an art related angle. So yesterday I took out a couple of books from the library about being an art teacher and what to teach and I'm reading them every chance I can get.

One of our assignments for Humanities is to go on excursion with a couple of other students to an excursion venue of our choice. Then we come back and during Expo Day we make a stall and report on it to everyone else who in turn have gone to other places and will tell us all about it. We've chosen Soverign Hill, which I haven't been to since I was a child. As well as the photographs, teaching resources, posters and fliers we'll bring back from our day into History, I also want to plan out a couple of art related activities you could set the children. As an art teacher would teach across all years, I want to come up with a couple of different art-related tasks that different ages could do.

There is lots of teaching related learning (how to be a teacher, how to teach) and a number of these are obviously across the board techniques, so they'll stand the student teachers in good stead whether they want to be a PE or art teacher or a general Primary School teacher. One of the things we were set as homework to do was read this article by Sir Ken Robinson. It talks about how creativity is neglected in society and especially in education, and how that needs to change. He wrote a book about it, which I went and bought from amazon. The link in down in a new section called Teacher Resources on your left.

When I first thought about going into teaching, I went and looked for blogs to let me know what it was going to be like, and dishearteningly, I found very little out there. It seems that a couple of people wanted to keep blogs as to what it was like


I think that he's right that the education system doesn't seem to foster or even appreciate creativity as it did/does subjects that are more 'intellectual'. It does seem to me, however, that Robinson uses 'creativity' and 'artistic' interchangeably and I don't agree that they're the same thing. Creativity is about thinking outside the box, coming up with new ways of thinking about things, and that has applications right across the board. To invent new things, come up with new ideas and theories, you need to think creatively about a problem. You can't invent something by following the same path as those who have gone before. Somewhere you have to turn left or right and forge a new path. And that requires creativity.

It's a huge change but it's really exciting!