Have a Hat Week! 5 Favorite Hat Books

Happy Hat Week!
There are so many fun books about Hats.
Take a week and celebrate the hat.
Here are some of my favorite hat books and activities:

• Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina. See my Caps for Sale post for games and activities that will have your kids monkeying around.
• A Three Hat Day written by Laura Geringer, illustrated by Arnold Lobel. My Three Hat Day post has suggestions on how to put on a Hat Parade.
• The Hat by Jan Brett. Visit my post about The Hat for a fun creative drama activity.
• The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss. This classic Seuss tale is about a young lad that, no matter how hard he tries, cannot take off his hat for the king. It seems that every time he takes one hat off another appears. This is a long story so break it up into two or three sections to read throughout your day. See the activities below for a counting hats game.
• Aunt Flossie's Hats (and Crab Cakes Later) by By Elizabeth Fitzgerald Howard. Paintings by James Ransome. Aunt Flossie is a great-great Aunt with a different hat for every story. When Elizabeth and Sarah visit they love to go through the hat boxes and hear the family stories. This book gives a great opportunity to create your own hat story. See the story writing activity below.

VillageHatShop.com provides a bibliography of approximately 50 children's books about Hats. They also give useful information about Hat History, a Hat Glossary, Hat Facts, Making Hats, Hats and World Culture. Be sure and check out this extremely informative hat site.

These Hat Week Lesson Plan Ideas are appropriate for home Laptime and classroom Story Circle.

Hat counting Game
This is a fun activity to promote number recognition and order.

You will need:

• A selection of hats. The number of hats will depend on the skill level of your students.
• Note cards with large easy to read numbers written on them to correspond with the number of hats that you have. For example: If you have 10 hats have 10 cards with one number for each hat.
• Pins to pin the number cards onto the hats.

How To Play:

• Hide the hats around the room. If it is a nice day, hide that hats outside.
• Choose as many children as you have hats to search for the hats.
• When all of the hats are found, have the children line up in the order of the number that is on the hat that they found.
• Do a check to see if the hats are in the correct order by having all of the children say the number on each hat.
• Choose one child to be Bartholomew Cubbins and stand at the front of the line.
• Have each child place their hat on Bartholomew's head while the whole groups says the number aloud.
• Just for fun, Bartholomew should try to balance all of the hats on his/her head. If they fall off, it's OK, keep going.
• Hide the hats again and let the next group of kids find the hats.

Write Your Own Hat Story
You will need:

• 1 sheet of drawing paper for each child
• One lined sheet of writing paper for each child
• crayons
• pencils

Write your own story:

• Pass out one piece of drawing paper for each child
• Have the children draw the most creative hat that they can imagine.
• Pass out the writing paper and pencils.
• Ask the children to think about their hats: What kind of hat is it? Who would wear this hat? What would someone do while they wore this hat? What makes this hat special?
• Have each child write a story using a prompt such as - One day when I was wearing my hat..... or This is my Grandfather's/ Grandmother's hat he/she always wore it when...... (If you have a younger class of non or early writers have them dictate the story while an adult or older child writes it down.)
• Allow the children time to share their stories with the group.