To be shocked that not even one y4 child knew the meaning of the word velvet?

[Utterlybananas333]

My sister is a teacher in a South London primary school, she is a year four teacher of around 30 8 to 9-year-olds. She was recently describing her disbelief over the fact that not a single child knew what velvet meant? There were some crazy guesses, and lots of children who thought it was cake (probably relating to red velvet). Is it just the fact that children and adults don't talk anymore? That nobody reads anymore? Or even watches educational TV programs? Would your child know?

It is defined by its warp and weft AND its fibre.

Velveteen is traditionally made from cotton with weft threads.

Thank you, @BackToLurk and @SoftBalletShoes - I’m glad someone else knows the phrase!

You saying you've worn velvet every day of December makes me think of Margot from The Good Life! 🤣

Don't forget steam locomotives. The idea of sending your son down a pit sounds horrendous now. Imagine MN with threads about the best flask/head torch/shampoo to remove coal dust and should our son work at the face or in the office. Trains of coal trucks were normal,

& Jerr-eh

I was talking to my (very expensively privately educated) older DS the other day about Bridget Bardot dying. He said he’d only heard of one French actor: Mr Bean.

Don’t know whether to 😂 or 😭.

As above, velvet is defined by its structure, not material. Silk was only historically used because it was the only material strong enough to withstand the process. Other materials were used as soon as they improved and are legitimate velvets.

I bet they'd all know what obsidian(sp?) is though...

Just asked 9 year old ds. He didn't know. He reads every day as we have a rule he can read in bed before he goes to sleep, he struggles to wind down and reading helps him transition from being in bed to going to sleep. We also have velvet cushion covers in living room, the word has just never come up for him.

I’m an English Lit academic and really unbothered by all of the points I have read here. Turnips are pretty much never eaten nowadays, the only way I’d expect a child to know what one was is through The Enormous Turnip. As for velvet, it isn’t a common fabric nowadays.

This doesn’t prove much, only that children haven’t been exposed to archaic vegetables.

@MayIDestroyYou

None of those children have a velvet quilt on a bed at home?
None of their mothers went to Christmas work parties in a velvet top? Or velvet trousers?
No velvet cushions on chairs?

I was a child in the sixties and seventies, in a pretty bourgeois home in South London, and I'm pretty sure I can answer 'no' to all those questions. In fact, I was probably well into my twenties before I encountered the word 'quilt'. This may be because, at twelve. I had given up on Jane Austen about two chapters in.

On the other hand, I knew what a candlewick bedspread was. I've just checked with my twenty-one-year-old daughter, and she hasn't a clue. I feel I've failed as a parent.

I've been teaching a long time and I'm less shocked by what they don't know and more fascinated by it- and by the way they suddenly know words I wouldn't expect them to know. Mine are all using the word 'vex', which 10 years ago they wouldn't have had a clue about. We take so much for granted. Having my own dc, who are exposed to a very wide vocabulary, is also interesting in terms of things they have absolutely no context for.

So much comes from their contextual knowledge. I think many of us grew up reading old books, so came across vast numbers of words we had to decode. Or had a very strange interpretation of. I bet if i re read Black Beauty or Little Women now, instead of at 8 or 9, I'd have a very different vision in my head.

Before teaching a text, we always try to pre empt the words kids will struggle with. It's fairly obvious with older texts, but evenwith more modern ones, you have to sit and think: right, when would a kid have come across x?

Im shocked none of the kids knew this… for those saying it’s a medieval fabric which isn’t worn anymore- yes it still is. More than this though, the word velvet/velvety is used in modern vocabulary to describe the feel or texture of something, so I would expect at least one out of the 30 children of this age to have an understanding of the word if they were reading and talking with others regularly .

Ah, @WalkDontWalk - we’re the same generation, and my deepest dive into quilts came via this totally wonderful story, which I must have read right at the end of the sixties. A patchwork quilt is at the centre of bringing a family together (can’t specifically recall velvet but there may have been some):

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1691408.ElizabethoftheGarretTheatre

This. I yap away to my kids constantly and they’re great talkers with a wide vocabulary but I wouldn’t swear to it that they’d know what velvet is. This is such an unnecessarily dramatic thread.

I suppose it's mostly a fabric that adult women wear, so unless you have velvet cushions in your house it's going to take a while to come across it as a concept.

I'd probably find it weird if they didn't know by 16.

Agree, I am 53 and my 16 year old is studying one of the same titles as I did for gcse, an Inspector Calls. So she knows steady the buffs!

Your mum would be ordering what she wanted online as the actual shop doesn't stock anything remotely useful. Size 42 cropped leggings or size 0 blazer.

Had turnip with my steak pie yesterday. You must lead a very sheltered life.

My mum was a dinner lady in a deprived area (as in, where we lived) and they had a big board with pictures and names of all the fruits and vegetables on them for that reason.
I myself only learned that I have a peach, walnut and cherry allergy when I first ate fresh cherries at the age of 28. Can't blame my mum for my lack of fruit exposure though, she always bought it, I just never ate it!

I suppose it is a bit strange that not ONE kid out of 20-30? kids knew what velvet was, but if you'd told me it was just a single kid then it wouldn't be weird. I'm sure my four year old knows what velvet is as we have velvet chairs... maybe I'll ask her.

There's always some random words that somehow escape a vocabulary. I was a self confessed geek at school, avid reader, amazing at spelling blah blah blah, but somehow I got to the age of about 10 and didn't know what a wardrobe or a duvet was 😂 (my parents aren't from England and always called a wardrobe a cupboard, and used their native language word for duvet).

We had quilts until I was about 10, so i wouldn't have heard the word duvet until about 1990. Think my parents were quite old fashioned though. I remember the excitement at a duvet because it meant we could change the covers on it!

Just asked my 11 year old (teens aren't here but im interested to see what they say too). 11 year old said 'something really soft'.

To be fair, they've never been exposed to velvet around me because the feel of it is akin to someone dragging their nails down a chalkboard to me, so we've never had anything even remotely velvet like in my house.

I just asked my 9 year old and they said velvet was a nice feeling fabric, and a handkerchief was for wiping your nose/face/tears.