Summary
In this lesson, students go on a hat hunt, enjoy a story, and play with words. Students are introduced to a variety of hats and headgear and their purposes. A parent guide for doing the lesson at home accompanies this lesson.
Essential Question(s)
Why do people wear hats and headgear? Why do we need different kinds of hats and headgear?
Snapshot
Engage
Spark students’ interest by wearing a funny hat. Students then share what they know about hats. This activity is followed by reading a fun book about hats.
Explore
Students participate in a hat-collecting activity in the classroom and/or around the school and then create a graph to show the results.
Explain
Students read or listen to the story Busy Izzy. They retell the story to a classmate and then use words from the story to add, delete, and substitute phonemes in one-syllable words. Students also produce groups of rhyming words.
Extend
Students complete a prediction chart as a class and then answer questions about an informational reading titled Why Do People Wear Hats?
Evaluate
After rereading the story Busy Izzy, students focus on helping Kelsey and Addy fix the problem. Using a provided handout, students match each hat with the person it likely belongs to. Then, students share the reasoning behind their matches.
Materials
Graph the Hats handout (attached)
Busy Izzy (attached)
Short Vowels handout (attached)
Long Vowels handout (attached)
Fun with Names! handout (attached)
Working with Words Answers (attached)
Be a Detective! handout (attached)
Why Do People Wear Hats (attached)
Question Sheet (attached)
Doghouse Activity handout (attached)
Parent and Home Guide (attached)
Real hats from home or pictures of hats
Pencil, paper, crayons/markers, scissors
Fun children’s book about hats
Engage
Start the lesson by wearing an unusual hat for the day, such as a helmet, a baseball cap, or a big floppy sun hat. Ask students, “What do you notice about what I am wearing on my head?”
After students have had a few minutes to enjoy the novelty of your headwear, gather more information from them about why they think people wear hats. Their answers may be documented on a chart or just enjoyed as a conversation. Then, read a fiction book about hats that is appropriate for students’ grade level.
A couple of suggestions are Do You Have a Hat? by Eileen Spinelli or A Good Day for a Hat by T. Nat Fuller. See below for more options.
Explore
Students will go on a “hat hunt” in the classroom and/or around the school. This does not have to be an independent activity—it may be done in pairs, in groups, or as a class.
Students may look for real hats, or you may cut out pictures of hats from magazines, catalogs, and newspapers and place them around the room. Don’t forget to include unusual hats like shower caps, sunhats, helmets, and goofy or special hats.
After students have located all the hats or have completed their hat collections, pass out the attached Graph the Hats handout to each student.
Have students create a picture graph to display the number of hats they found of each kind. The first page of the handout already has pictures of various hats on the x-axis, but the second page contains a blank graph if you would like students to draw their own hats.
Students may create their graphs by grouping their hats according to type and then counting them, or they may draw pictures of their different types of hats and use cubes to represent the number of hats in each group. Alternatively, you may have students place their hat pictures in a pocket chart or make a Sticky Bars graph.
Explain
Have students read or listen to the story Busy Izzy. Pass out the attached Busy Izzy handout if you would like each student to have their own copy. The story accompanies more than one activity in this section of the lesson, so it may be useful to provide each student with their own handout, even if you read the story aloud.
After the story, have students use the instructional strategy Think-Pair-Share to think about the story on their own and then retell the story to a partner. Encourage students to draw a few pictures about the story during the “Think” portion of the Think-Pair-Share activity. The retelling of the story also may be done as a whole class.
Once the class finishes its retelling of Busy Izzy, have students use the story to play with words and rhyming. Say to students: “Before we help Kelsey and Addy find out more about the hats that Izzy hid in the doghouse, let’s look at some words that Addy used in her story.”
As students work through the following activities, display Busy Izzy on the classroom screen if students do not have their own copies of the story to work with. First, ask students to complete the following tasks:
Find the compound words in the story and draw a box around each. (Answers: baseball, doghouse, hardhat.)
Circle all the words about headgear or types of hats in the story. (Answers: batting helmets, baseball cap, caps, helmets, bicycle helmet, police officer’s hat, hardhat, hat.)
Answer this question: What do you think Addy meant when she said “the time had flown by”? (Possible answers: “Time went really fast” or “They were having fun, so they forgot about the time.”)
Next, invite students to complete a rhyming activity. Pass out the attached Short Vowels handout and/or the Long Vowels handout if students have a good grasp of short-vowel words and you wish to offer more of a challenge. For an additional challenge, substitute words with diphthongs such as house, flown, or now.
Then, pass out the attached Fun with Names! handout. Have each student write their name at the top of the first column. After doing so, students will use their name and the names from the story to come up with other names that begin with the same letter. Students should be encouraged to capitalize only the first letter of each name.
Extend
Pass out the attached Be a Detective! handout to each student. Start with the prediction chart.
Ask students to predict which of the statements about hats are true and which are false. Most students will know what true and false mean, but you might have to revisit the meaning of false as “not true.” Students should base their predictions on their prior knowledge. Let students know they should just have fun and “be a detective” as they look for clues in the story!
After students make their predictions, use a copy of the attached Why Do People Wear Hats? to read the story aloud, or provide students with their own copies to read the story on their own.
After reading, have students go back to their Be a Detective! handout and fill out the final column of the prediction chart with what they have learned after reading.
Then, pass out the attached Question Sheet to each student and have them answer the five questions on the handout. See below for examples of possible answers to each question.
Evaluate
After rereading the story Busy Izzy, have students focus on helping Kelsey and Addy fix the problem. In the story, Izzy the dog hides the hats she collected in her doghouse. Explain to students that the hats will need to be returned to the people they belong to.
Pass out the attached Doghouse Activity handout to each student. On their handout, students will match each hat with the person that would wear the hat. When they are done, students will share the reasoning behind their matches.
Answers may vary, but students should be able to talk about the reasoning behind their choices.
(Hint: There is more than one correct answer for some of the hats.)
Differentiated Opportunities for Advanced Students
Depending on the strengths of each student, here are some additional opportunities and ideas that may increase the rigor of the activities in this lesson.
Students could design a type of headgear that would give more protection than a bike helmet if they fell.
Students could answer or create “What would happen if … ?” questions.
Instead of the basic word work in this lesson, students could look for multi-syllable words in the stories and create rhymes using those words.
Students who enjoy math could create inventive ways to group the hats and/or find another way the hats could be graphed.
Students could play with the number 10 and answer simple mathematical questions. (E.g., “How many ways can you make 10?” Answers could include 1+9, 2+8, 3+5+2, and so on.)
Resources
K20 Center. (n.d.). Sticky Bars. Strategies. https://learn.k20center.ou.edu/strategy/129
K20 Center. (n.d.). Think-Pair-Share. Strategies. https://learn.k20center.ou.edu/strategy/139