Development of Teaching Materials For Elementary School Consumer Education

ーSewing Machine Manual Making一

Abstract

Most products are sold with a manual which explains how to use the product safely. If the manual is incomprehensible or erroneous, it is impossible for users to make full use of the product. They could suffer serious damage, or even worse, risk their lives by an inadequate explanation. I have been interested in the possibility of manual making at the elementary school level and have looked for suitable material for more than ten years, but could not find any. However, student today are forced to cope with various manuals, and the situation . has caused a number of problems. There is a unit called ”Sewing by Machine” at the fifth grade. I finally decided that making their own sewing machine manuals while they do the actual sewing would help students get used to the machine. For that purpose, I have compared and studied various sewing machine manuals. For elementary school students, sewing machine manuals contain too much information and the explanations are hard to read or understand, not to mention to write. Besides, photo. graphs and illustrations required for quick comprehension are even harder to make. On the part of teachers, ”Sewing by Machine” has also been considered one of the most difficult units to teach. Some of the reasons are as such; the number of sewing machines at school is often smaller than that of students, they are not necessarily the same model of the same manufacturer: they are often different from the model explained in the textbook, manuals are often missing, students have little experience at home, manuale are hard to understand. Considering all these, the idea of making sewing manuals put into practice. This included examination of product names and guarantees, and the help of necessary illustrations drawn freehand by the teacher. The class evaluations by the students were generally favorable.