A fourth-grade class at Elmwood School recently shared their research on former President Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era with fellow students.
Jamie Kanas’ fourth-grade class met in the school’s new cafeteria on April 15, the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, to show off their research on the president and the Civil War. A large quilt the class helped to make was also on display.
Kanas said that she and her mother-in-law, Bernadette Kanas, put the quilt together. The square pieces of cloth that made up the majority of the quilt had drawings of Lincoln on it, which were done by her students.
For the past seven years, Kanas has enlisted her students help make the quilts, each highlighting a different event. Once completed, the quilt would hang on the wall of her classroom.
Kanas and her mother-in-law love to sew, so they work on the quilts together.
“Every year, we will sit down and talk about what we want to do each year,” Bernadette Kanas said. “We bring them the [quilt] square and they would do their artwork on it and I sew it together.”
During the hour-long event, students showed off their memory skills by reciting Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. They also explained how some of the quilt’s patches had a hidden meaning.
Madeline Helin, 10, and Mary Sulo, 10, showed how different symbols on quilt patches were often used to help slaves escape from the south through the Underground Railroad.
“The ‘Drunkard Path Patch’ let the slaves know that they should walk in a zigzag pattern because someone is following them,” Helin said.
Other patches placed in a window of a home or drawn on the ground would often let runaway slaves know that they were welcome at that home or in a safe area.
Sulo said figuring out the different quilt patch symbols and what they stood for was a bit difficult in the beginning.
“We studied in class and it was really cool,” she said. “At first it was really hard, but we figured it out.”
David Tenuta, 10, was in charge of letting people use a tablet computer to access a video recording of the class reciting the Gettysburg Address. A QR code was attached to the quilt and once it was scanned, the video could be seen.
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Jamie Kanas said it’s their way of letting those who may inquire about the quilt and its meaning get some information about it in the future.
“I’ve always been interested in Lincoln and I learned how to sew when I was a little girl,” she said. “It’s kind of like a teaching art form to be able to incorporate a sewing project every year and it is really fun for me.”
She said that it inspires the children she teaches, past and present.
“I have kids who tell me they took sewing classes or asked their parents for a sewing machine,” Kanas said.