Prince Crowns and Damsel Hats

We are talking about fairy tales this week so I decided to take it up a notch and teach the kids about Medieval Times. I even made a "castle" in dramatic play by using large white paper. I put it up on one wall, cut out some windows and drew vines on it.

It was bigger, but I had forgotten about the intercom on the wall, so I sliced off a little from each side. It was actually very easy to make. I've made something similar a few times at my other center, but my room had drop ceilings so I was able to hang the castle wall from the ceiling. I would make two walls and hang them in the corner so the kids could actually play inside the castle walls and look out the windows. (Sorry there are no pictures. It was pre-blog!) But there's no way I could hang it from the ceiling in my current center so I did the next best thing by taping it to the wall. I also brought in some princess and knight masks for the kids to wear.

The masks came from on old computer game I had (Kid Pix Adventures) and I've been using them for years. The princess mask is actually a Cleopatra mask -- it has a snake on the crown!
Anyway, today the kids made their own crowns. I made the prince crowns with large construction paper and the princess crowns (or damsel hats) with the same big white paper I made the castle out of. We used some self-adhesive jewels that I received from CraftProjectIdeas.com.

They were the perfect touch that our crowns needed. I also put out some foam heart stickers (and a few frogs, because a kissed frog might turn into a prince!).

I had to add a piece of scrap paper (that I saved when cutting out the crowns) so they'd fit around the boys' heads. Now, the damsel hats were a bit more complicated. I only have two girls in my class so I didn't mind the trouble. Many years ago I ordered damsel hat crafts from Oriental Trading Company and saved one for my template. It was too big for construction paper, which is why I used the big white butcher paper. However, the white paper was super thin and not ideal but I was able to work with it. Here's how it looks cut out:

The girls decorated the paper the same way the boys did.

Then I added a bunch of ribbon to the top. I just taped the ends in place. In the past I've also used crepe paper instead of ribbon. It works just as well.

Then all you have to do is roll it up and staple or tape it together. My paper was very flimsy which made this step difficult. I've also cut big circles out of paper and cut a slit halfway through the circle and then just rolled it into a cone that way. That was actually easier, but you waste a lot of paper when rolling it up and most of the decorating gets hidden.

The ribbon hangs down the back of the hat.

These hats don't stay on well so I added an elastic string to go around their neck. Because the paper was thin, I made the area that had the hole punch in it stronger by putting packaging tape over it. Does that make sense? All the trouble was worth it, though, because they all loved wearing their royal crowns!