Art class: hats

We did something a little different in last week's art class. Up until then we'd been working on 2D artwork, but this time we played around with some three-dimensional stuff. We read two books about hats (the girls voted for a second book): Twelve Hats for Lena (which may have been a little young for this group) and Millie's Marvellous Hat (a cute book about imagination).

Since the weather was uncooperative (very hot and humid with a threat of thunderstorms) I decided to play it safe and hold class indoors. My assistant had camp this week, so my mom helped out. We talked a little about what could go on the hats, but they were very anxious to get started. I put out a variety of materials for them to work with: feathers, oil pastels (they love these), paints, buttons, ribbon, yarn, pipe cleaners and pom-poms.

While the hats were drying (those pom-poms need a lot of glue!), they drew people with crazy hats on black paper with chalk pastels. Those were also a big hit. Some of the drawings were just a big mess of pastels that they had smooshed around the paper with their hands. A few of the girls (mine included) just wanted to put their hand in the pastels - never mind a drawing. I managed to reel them in and remind them to create a crazy hat drawing!

One of the girls had the idea to make bracelets with the pipe cleaners, and hats were even created for a special stuffed animal.