Hat Day

Objective: 
The students will give and receive directions for creating a hat.

Materials

• Simple outline drawing of a hat, two for each student (if working in pairs), one for each student (if working as a whole class with the teacher - see #4 in Procedure.)  A top hat may be easiest to draw and run off on a copy machine.
• Crayons, markers, or colored pencils.
• Writing Utensils
• Paper

Procedure

1. Pass out the outline drawings of the hats.  Have the students decorate one of the hats with their medium of choice, keeping their pictures to themselves, so the other students do not see them.
2. Put the students in pairs.  
3. Have one student describe their hat to the other student, without revealing the picture.  The other student should listen carefully and follow directions for recreating the decorations of the hat which is described.  They should recreate the hat on their second outlined drawing.  Once the child has finished describing the hat, he/she should reveal it to the other student to see how similar the drawings are.  Then the students may switch roles for giving and following directions. 
4. With younger students, the teacher may want to be the one describing a hat he/she has decorated, while all the children are listening and drawing.   

Other Lesson Ideas

1. Work as a class to find items, or pictures of items, which rhyme with hat and place them in a hat.
2. Work as a class to find short a items and make a list inside the cut-out shape of a hat.
3. Read some Cat in the Hat books.
4. Have a "Show and Tell" time for the students to talk about the hats they wore to school.  As an alternative, have the students write about the hats they brought in to school.  What kind of hat is it?  Where did it come from?  Why did they choose that particular hat?
5. Read "The Hat" by Jan Brett, as well as the motivation behind her book at All About The Hat.
6. Have the students act out "Little Red Riding Hood".