Fiber & Cloth
📋 What it is
Cloth starts as fiber. Natural fibers come from plants (cotton, linen from flax) or animals (wool from sheep, silk from silkworms); the fiber is spun into thread, then woven or knitted into fabric.
🗣️ Coach says
Every piece of cloth answers a geography question: what grew or grazed nearby? A place with lots of sheep dresses in wool; a river valley that grows flax makes linen. Read the fiber and you read the land.
🧠 Memory hook
Fiber → thread → cloth. Plant or animal fiber tells you what the land provided.
😲 Whoa!
A single silkworm cocoon can unravel into ONE continuous thread up to about 900 metres long — that is why silk was worth its weight in trade.
✅ Quick check: Linen comes from which source — and what does that tell you about the place that made it?
Say your answer out loud first — then reveal.
From the flax plant, so linen points to a place that could grow flax (a temperate, well-watered region).
Matching a fiber to its plant or animal is how a fabric reveals the geography that produced it.
🧪 Try it! (2 minutes)
Check the labels on three things you own — list whether each fiber came from a plant or an animal.