Before Class: Send home a note to ask each child to wear their favorite clothes to preschool for today's lesson!
Attention Getter: Fabric Galore
Sew a long strip of varied fabric together. Have a small piece hanging outside of the treasure chest to attract the children's attention. Start pulling it out. Let each child hang on to part of it as you pull. Listen to the students comments as you do this to begin the discussion of fabric and clothing. Point out the variety of fabrics that the children can see and encourage the children to look around at each others' clothes to notice the variety of fabrics and colors that they see.
Activity 1: Clothing Brainstorming
Ask the children to think about all the different types of clothing that they wear. Then go around the circle and record their individual answers on the board. Encourage them to think beyond just pants and shirts.
Book: Where Did My Clothes Come From?
Before reading the story, bring out the five items that represent the fabrics you will be discussing: sheep, sticky syrup (corn syrup in a bottle), cotton plant (cotton balls glued to a stick), water bottle and silkworm (plastic caterpillar wrapped with yarn). Tell the children that their clothes are made out of these items! They will be quite surprised. After introducing each item, play a quick Memory Game where children close their eyes and you remove one thing. Have them open their eyes to see what is missing.
Then introduce the book and discuss it. We decided to focus on Wool, Synthetics, Cotton, Fleece and Silk. As we showed the pages of the book, we summarized the fabric making process and then matched the picture, item and clothing that were discussed.
Activity 2: What Are Your Clothes Made Of?
Roll out the red carpet, or blue or whatever you have! Let each child come up, stand on it, and tell the class what they love about their favorite clothes they wore. Then, look at the fabric and tell them what their shirt is made of. Place a sticker on their shirt to represent what their clothes are made of. (We created stickers, as shown below. We printed them out on Avery 5160 labels which made them very easy to use.) The children loved them and it was one of the first things they showed their parents when they arrived.
Bonus Section: Here's What We Did For Art!
Clothing Designers: Each child was given a 12x18 piece of construction paper with a picture of their head glued to the top. A variety of fabrics were cut into squares (for shirts), triangles (for dresses) and long rectangles (for sleeves and pants). Buttons, lace and other materials were also available.
Tell the children that they are going to be able to design their own clothing. They can think about what they would like to wear and choose what colors and designs they would like with the wide variety of fabrics and materials that were available.
*Because the papers they were working on were large, we put the supplies in a central location so that the children could go and choose an item and then take it back to their table to glue it on. The children could also add buttons and lace and other collage materials that were available. This was a very successful project that they were thoroughly engaged in.
