Hats!

By John Tenniel - Lewis Carroll, Public Domain
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=629715

Americans have a love of hats.  We can often be seen wearing baseball hats at games, our militia wear hats, even our hospital heroes!  Hats can have so many different purposes fashion, sun protection, and even for our own safety (hospital professionals).

Early Americans wore hats made out of animals.  A beaver hat, once worn, was thought to improve a man's hearing and improved memory.  These hats were handed down throughout the family and even granted in wills.

American women, in those days, wore simple bonnets but as time went on they became more elaborate.  You would often see a lady with lace, feathers and wide brims. 

Lewis Carol wrote an incredible book called "Alice in Wonderland."  This book, written in 1865, had the character The Mad Hatter.  The Mad Hatter truly was mad or crazy.  Mercury, which is a poisonous metal, was used in felt hat production.  It would create a neurological disorder, therefore creating a madness with the hatters.

The history of hats in our country is an incredible thing.  Here are a few sites for research!
Evolution of the Hat

Village Hat Shop
All That's Interesting

Game:
Get a bucket "hat", lay it on its side.  Get a straw or roll a piece of paper into a straw and have a race to blow cotton balls into the "hat."

Books about hats:
Milo's Hat Trick by Jon Agee
Jeannie's Hat By Ezra Jack Keats
Old Hat New Hat By Stan and Jan Berenstain
The Hat By Jan Brett
The Cat in the Hat By Dr. Suess

Did you know, the next National Hat Day is January 15, 2021?

Did you know:
That the word hat is used in math? "The hat is a caret-shaped symbol commonly placed on top of variables to give them special meaning. The symbol  is voiced "-hat" (or sometimes as "-roof") in mathematics, but is more commonly known as the circumflex in linguistics (Bringhurst 1997, p. 274)."

 Ha Ha!
What did the tie say to the hat?
You go on ahead and I'll hang around

Craft:

Supplies:
Paper
Crayons

May need feathers, glue or anything else you can use to decorate.

Take a piece of paper and fold it in half. You don't want it long.

Fold in half again.

Fold like an airplane leaving the bottom open.

Fold the bottom up.

And pull out to the sides.  Now you can decorate it however you like.

 Motivational Activity:
Create an I can book.  Draw pictures on paper of things you can do and staple it together.  Older kids can get a notebook and write the things they can do.

This would also be a good time to include what's called a Starfish.  To explain what a Starfish is, I'm going to tell a story...

There was a small little girl on the beach.  She was throwing starfish into the ocean.  The entire beach was covered in starfish that needed water to survive.  An elderly man approached her. "Little one, what are you doing?"

She replied, "I'm throwing starfish into the ocean!"

The man sputtered, "Well, why would you want to do that? You can't save them all!"

She thought for a second, starfish in hand tossing it as far as her little arms could. "But I can save this one!"

What a starfish is, is one thing during your day in which you made a difference to someone.  If you made masks for nurses, that's a starfish.  If you hugged a parent, that's a starfish.