Daisy-Head Mayzie

We are celebrating Dr. Seuss books this week! Today's was Daisy-Head Mayzie, which I have never read before. It's a wonderful book!

As you can probably tell from the title and picture, it's about a little girl who has a daisy growing out of the top of her head! So today we made daisy headbands.

I couldn't resist putting my headband on the Operation guy. We studied our bodies last week and this was still left out on my desk. So cute! Anyway, I cut green construction paper up like this:

One thin strip and then I cut the remaining paper in half. I wasn't perfect with my cutting. No ruler lines here! The bigger sections are for the grass and the little strip was added to the back so it fit on a child's head. If you use large construction paper, you might not need to add a strip. Also, this gave me two grass sections per paper, but only one strip so I had to cut a few more strips from another piece. Make sense? Anyway, the kids used scissors to make a fringe along the paper.

I told them they could just do one cut for each blade of grass. You know, cut and move over, cut and move over, and so on. But because their scissors are so much smaller than mine, the grass slits weren't very long. So I ended up cutting off part of the paper so the headband wouldn't be this big wall of green paper with a little fringe on top. It would look more like grass. So in hindsight, I could have easily cut the construction paper into thirds, and then cut the extra strips from another piece.
When the grass was done, they moved onto their flowers. I decided to let the kids make any kind of flower they wanted using any color of paper. (It's just more fun that way!) But this is also where it got a little difficult for them. I wanted them to draw their own flower and then cut it out. But they really struggled with it. A few kids drew very complicated flowers, with lots of petals, and then had a hard time cutting them out. So we kind of compromised. I said either I could draw a simple flower for them and they could cut it out, or they could draw the flower and I would cut it out. That seemed to work much better.

When the flower was done, they added a middle and a stem, using pipe cleaners and sparkly pom poms that were sent to me from CraftProjectIdeas.com.

I also let the kids pick any color stem they wanted, instead of just using the green. So they picked their pipe cleaner and I cut off the bottom third and they used that piece to make a leaf.

We used glue dots to attach the pom pom to the middle of the flower. Then I stapled a strip of green paper to their grass and taped on the flower so it would be at the back of their head.

Then I measured their heads and stapled the other side appropriately. If the flower drooped a little, I just made the stem shorter and re-taped it.

At first, only the girls made one.

But after I lined them up to take their picture, a few boys came over to the art table. Yay!