Categories Literacy

Silly Hats!

(Graphics: Ashley Hughes-paper The Library Fox-hats)

It’s funny how quickly you become “known” for something. Well, for me, as we all know, is hats and mustaches. And I embrace both of those. In fact, after some convincing I have convinced the mister to let me decorate my office with mustaches. Simple and tasteful mustaches, of course!

The hats started when I bought this great product from my friend Jennifer at Simply Kinder!

She has a set of alphabet sentence strips (Click here!). When I discovered this set this summer I immediately thought about how much fun it would be to do a hat each week. Well that became a hat for letters…a hat for themes…a hat for holidays and well, now we just love our silly hats! (Don’t worry there will be a Common Core aligned kindergarten smorgasboard hat creation coming!)I also have to give a big shout out to The Moffatt Girls for their phonics hats!

I have used hats from both of these lovely ladies, I have combined their ideas into hybrid hats and I have created my own hats!

Why hats? Well, they are a great “hook” for our lessons. We do our letter/phonics hats on Monday as our kick off for the letter or sound of the week (not that we focus on a letter or sounds each week…that’s bad…bad. ***sarcasm alert***). This helps the monsters associate pictures or animals to the letter sound. This is especially helpful for my monsters who have a more difficult time with sounds and letters. It’s also powerful for the monsters to be walking around our school and have people ask them why did you make this hat and they can respond by saying the letter and sounds we are not focusing on!

The hats are also great for listening skills and following directions (which is a common core standard!) and quite simply, they’re fun and learning should be fun.

The best part about the hats is that they are almost completely independent. Early in the school year we did them together, step by step but now they do them all on their own. I ALWAYS do my own hat and have it on my head to model for the monsters. They can look at my hat to see how to do their own hat. They only thing I have to do is staple the sentence strips! This is our ticket to centers and a great motivator to get our Monday picture sort done (Monday schedule is this: read aloud/comprehension then picture sort then hat then centers!).

So they’re not just a waste of time and sentence strips. They provide motivation and reinforcement for phonics skills! And they are helping us meet common core standards! BAM!

So, here they are! All of our hats…or as many as I could find pictures of!