Easy hat craft and games

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Hat Day is in September

These simple hats can be made from paper plates and can be decorated by participants

 The first step here is the same for any of the hat designs. Just fold the plate in half and cut the hole for the head (remember to leave a little part where the center design is still attached to the brim.) It’s best to guess the hole size a little on the small side, because if it doesn’t fit then you can always trim the hole a bit bigger.

Once you have the first cut made, you can then decide what you want your hat decoration to be. In this case the shamrock is symmetrical, so keeping the plate folded in half makes it easy to cut the shamrock leaf symmetrically. Once you’re done, open it up and decorate it any way you like. At this point I like to hand the cut out plates over to the participants to decorate, However, higher functioning residents can cut out the designated design.

Options for these kinds of hats are only limited by your imagination.

These hats can be used for a couple of interesting games.
Number shuffle.
Divide the participants into two teams (this works best if you have a minimum of five players in each team) Make the basic circle paper plate hats in advance and number them for however many people are in each team. Put the plate hats on the participant’s heads so that they cannot see their own number. Then see which team can line themselves up in numerical order. Alternately for a lower functioning group, just have one set of numbered hats. Then see if they can see who has number 1 etc by asking if the number on their hat is number 1. The rest of the group can tell the designated participant if the number on his hat is higher or lower than he guessed. Keep going until he guesses the number on his hat. Then he can pick who guesses next. Keep going for the designated amount of time or until everyone has guessed. Then you can put the participants in numerical order by the number on their hats. There are many adaptations to this game. If you need any, just leave a question in the comment section.

Guess Who.
Each person wears a hat with the name and picture of a character/real person on the front that they cannot see. Everyone else can see who they are though. Each person gets to ask “yes/no answer” questions to the group to try and guess who they are, such as “Am I fictional?” or “Am I human?” etc. If the answer to your question is yes then you get to ask another question. If the answer to your question is no then it is the next person’s turn to start asking their questions. The winner is the first person to correctly guess their secret identity.

Again you can modify this game for a lower functioning crowd. Just leave a question in the comment section.