Instructional Place-mats for silverware

Instructional 

Placemats

Placemats, do they really serve a functional purpose?  Most of the time I would say no. They can be bulky sometimes which makes it hard to place your dishes on them without having them tilted. They are often too small for the size of dishes. For example we have a set of store bought placemats and we can’t fit adult size dishes on them. If we put a plate on them there is no room for a cup and the silverware is right on the edge of the seam for the placemat. 

After this experience I looked around at placemats at various stores and most seem to be about the same size. Or if the placemat is large enough to put adult size dishes on them then there is no room to put the food on the table. 

So what choices do I have if I get a placemat that is large enough for an adult size dish?

1. I could leave the food in another room, serve the food I am going to eat onto my plate and eat in the dining room. The problem here is we have enough problems getting our kids to stay in their seats at meal time without giving them another reason to get out of their seats.

2. Get a wider table, one more like a square than a rectangle. This seems like an extreme solution to me. I don’t want to buy furniture just so I can use something decorative.

3. We don’t use placemats.  Seemed like a reasonable solution to me, there is no practical function to placemats.  The beauty they add does not seem worth the work of washing them after each meal because my kids spilled something on it.

4. We use kids sized plates, bowls and cups.  This option has its benefits to me as an adult. It could help me control my portion sizes more easily. This would be better for my health.

Over the years we have gone with solution #3 and just not used them. Then when we started home school with Spiderman Jr.  we decided to slowly implement the Montessori Method .This meant that sometimes the purpose of an item was for it to be beautiful.  It is an interesting idea that children take better care of things that look and feel nice.  On top of these ideas I watched some instructional videos on how to use the Montessori Method and I saw how everything they do with the kids reinforces personal responsibility.  I also saw on one of the videos a table cloth in the class room that had stitched down places for where the cups, bowls, plates etc. go.  This particular item made me pause because this method builds in ways for the children to see on their own that something is wrong and how they can fix it on their own.  This table cloth fit right in line with this same approach to instruction. 

However, my kids spill a lot and I didn’t want one kids pulling on the table cloth and causing another kids drink to spill.  So I thought individual placemats with stitches showing where everything goes would be a viable alternative.  It also occurred to me that our youngest would not likely go along with the new rules if the older kids didn’t have to when they were home.  So I talked with my older kids and asked for their help. I asked them to go along with the practical life parts of instruction when they were home so that their younger brother would have a good example and they agreed.

So I went to work creating placemats that could be used to teach where to place your cup, bowl, plate, knife, fork and spoon.

Step#1

I gathered some worn jean material

Step#2

 

I cut the two jeans along the seams so that I had flat pieces of fabric.

Step#3

I pinned the two pieces together.

Step#4

I sewed the two pieces together.

Step#5

I opened the seam and pinned it down.

Step#6

I sewed a stitch that was wide enough to hold down both sides of the seam. So that it would be flat rather than bumpy or ridged after washing.

Step#7

I them laid the joined fabric down and pinned the store bought place mat to the material.

Step#8

I cut out 6 place mats.

Step#9

I used the same wide stitch that I had used to flatten and join the two pieces of jean around the edge of the new placemat.  I did this because I know jean frays and I thought this would be a way to embrace it rather than fight it.

Step#10

I took the kids size dishes and placed them on top of the mats and traced them with a fabric pencil.  I decided to use the kid size dishes because that is what the kids use. That size will also help me with portion control.

Step#11

I stitched with white thread where I had marked with the fabric pencil.

Step#12

I washed the placemats to get rid of the fabric pencil marks and to preemptively fray the jean then trimmed the fray.

Step#13

Trying it out on the kids.

Materials                       Cost

Denim- 2 old pairs of Jeans               0.00

White thread-I already had               0.00

Total Cost

                                        0.00

 I believe they find them fun to use.  However, they still grumble and complain when I ask them to wash their own dish, and roll up their mat to put it away.  It has now been a month and a half of using these instructional place mats. They occasionally use the store bought ones (when the ones I made are in the wash) without the stitches indicating where everything goes and they get where things go without the stitches 60% of the time.  Their behavior at the table is also slowly improving which is very nice for my husband and me.  From my perspective it has been nice to add a functional purpose to something that is normally only decorative.