Hats Off to Trash Hats

hat from stove top packaging and a little ribbon

As my daily high school art students met to make fashion from garbage, my elementary and self-contained classes joined in on the fun with their hat making project. I started by teaching how to make a traditional pirate hat from newspaper, but students had lots of other ideas and the project quickly developed to making pointed party hats, crowns, and sunshine headbands. Two class sessions is all it takes to realize that there are lots of options on types hats and techniques to making them.a runway show stopper made of plastic cups, hot dog papers and foil.

As a literary component to the lesson I introduced students to one of my favorite childhood picture books: OLD HAT, NEW HAT by Jan and Stan Berenstain. In English class we are taught that a sentence requires both a noun and a verb, and that writers use sentences to write stories. But this book only contains one nouns (spoiler alert, it's "hat") and NO verbs!  It's a book of adjectives, opposites, rhymes, and of course hats! I love it because it's a great book to teach little kids about how to describe as well as having them make predictions using rhymes and context. It also contains a great life lesson about how about how sometimes forget about how great things are for us until we go looking for something newer and better only to realize that nothing compares to a favorite, albeit old, hat.  Maybe our lives aren't as bad as we think. 

So make hats during your language lesson or read during your art lesson, but either way, you will walk out of the classroom with a little bit of style!