Melanie Pickens picks up a coaster-sized circle of deep purple yarn, inspecting it to see if it will lie flat against a table.

"This is too lumpy," 9-year-old Melanie told her teacher, Roberta Konefal-Shaer, of the crocheted disc that will someday become a hat. "What do you think I should do now? Do you think I should do a double stitch?"

At the Waldorf School, boys and girls from kindergarten through fifth grade scrutinize their knitting, crocheting and sewing projects like students elsewhere might examine computer programs or graphing calculators.

The private school in Bloomfield -- one in a network of more than 900 schools practicing "Waldorf Education" worldwide -- is founded partly on the principle that handwork (knitting, crocheting and sewing) is critical to a child's intellectual and emotional development.

"They're training their fingertips to be more alive," said Ms. Konefal-Shaer, the school's handwork teacher. Every child in the school has two 45-minute handwork lessons per week, in which kindergartners do projects such as sewing pouches for treasures found on nature walks and fifth-graders spend much of the year knitting socks.

Knitting not only energizes the children's tactile sense but is also instrumental in mental development, said Ms. Konefal-Shaer.

"A child who knits when he's 6 will be a much stronger reader," she said. "They learn to communicate between both sides of the brain."

Students also learn math, spatial and geometric skills in knitting and sewing, she said, whether it's first-graders counting off stitches in each row of their scarves or fourth-graders creating and embroidering geometric patterns.

Waldorf Schools, founded in Germany in the early 20th century, stress "educating the whole child -- head, heart and hand."

The Pittsburgh school, which began 15 years ago on the South Side, has about 85 students in nursery school through fifth grade.

The schools are distinctive in many ways. Arts and music are integral to the curriculum, for example, and students learn both Spanish and Russian in elementary grades. Students make and eat organic snacks, television is discouraged for children under 10 and walls are painted specific colors for each grade level, going from warm to cool colors as the students get older.

Tuesday, Ms. Konefal-Shaer dropped by the first-grade classroom for one of her biweekly visits, bringing with her a "magic box" full of the students' yarn and half-knitted scarves.

Earlier in the year, the students made their own knitting needles by sanding down dowel rods and dipped yarn in different dye pots to create their own personalized yarn balls. They listen to a story while they knit, and just as some first-graders are better readers than others, some Waldorf students fly through rows and stitches like they've been doing so for years while others struggle to remember the first stitch.

To teach knitting to first-graders, Ms. Konefal-Shaer creates a story about a captain of a ship who goes in the front door and jumps out the back, the movements telegraphing a knitting stitch.

Taking on a project like a scarf also helps teach first-graders to manage frustration. "Remember, just about everybody makes just about every mistake there is," she tells the class, first correcting their mistakes without their knowledge and then gradually pointing out missed or mangled stitches and teaching them to recognize their own imperfections.

In some years, students visit a textile farm to see where wool comes from, even learning to spin their own yarn. Second-graders do projects such as knitting stuffed sheep, dogs and squirrels, third-graders crochet hats and sleeves for their flutes and fourth-graders sew and embroider purses.

The culminating project in fifth grade is a pair of socks -- something that takes the students nearly the whole year to complete. "You really have to be a skilled knitter to knit socks," said Ms. Konefal-Shaer. "Once you do socks, you can do anything. You can make a cardigan, a jumper."

The third-graders gathered in Ms. Konefal-Shaer's handwork room on Tuesday are quickly mastering crocheting, noting how much faster it is than knitting. The students are crocheting hats from pictures that they drew on index cards; like the other handwork projects, they do not use a pattern.

Uma Harkness, 8, is trying to recreate a lacy, flowery purple hat to match one that came with her American Girl doll. Laurel Conover, 9, is making one striped with pink and purple because "pink's my favorite color and purple's my second favorite."

Melanie's purple hat will eventually be adorned with a brown flower. First, however, she must rip out a row of her stitches and mix some double stitches in with single ones to make the emerging circle lie flat.

The school believes that part of the process -- plugging away through failures and successes to eventually create a quality final product -- is an essential part of handwork's educational value.

"The persistence that comes from working through a project that is challenging is a huge byproduct," said Joan Rossi, the school's enrollment director.

"In the world today we have instantaneous success with children," added Ms. Konefal-Shaer, "and I'm not sure that's a good thing."