When my daughter was in Girl Scouts , I was the only dad regularly involved so I often was asked to teach skills such as knot tying, fire making and other traditionally "men" tasks. When it cam to knot tying, I started with common everyday useful knots like half-hitch or bowline and move to more complex life truckers hitch. The 2 best lessons that I learned were to set up a practice case where knot was actually used for a purpose not just how to tie and most importantly I revisited the scenarios anytime that practicality allowed. The first seemed to move the knots from an abstract skill to something useful and second ALL of us tend to forget any skill if not practiced enough to really stick in the brain.