Crowns and Headwear
This last weekend our Exploring Artism program looked at the various kinds of headwear and crowns on the sculptures in the Sculpture Victorious exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art.
We began our session by looking through our social story on our new iPads! Our warm up activity consisted of various crowns that we had the option of decorating with markers. HERE are some examples of the warm up activity.
Next, we used the Hats&Caps app on our iPads (find it here) to get a chance to “try on” some crowns. Here are some photos from our Hats&Caps activity:
Next, we headed into the gallery to look at some crowns on the statues in our temporary exhibition. Sitting around each sculpture, participants were asked some of the following questions: Is there anything you notice on the head of the sculpture? What do you see? What colors? How many? What are they made of? How do you think the artist made this? Why is this person portrayed in this way? Who gets to wear a crown?
Next, we played a crown matching game in the gallery. The game, which you can find here, consisted of 20 cards which can be matched to create 10 pairs. Participants had the option of laying all of their cards face up and making matches by looking at the different crowns OR laying the cards face down and playing a memory matching game. Once everyone had a chance to play the matching game, we went back into the Docent Room to make our own crowns. 
Back in the Docent Room, participants were able to make two different crowns our of paper plates. The first, explained here, was a six-prong crown made by cutting a paper plate and folding the points. The second, explained here, was a tiara-style headpiece which was made by cutting a paper plate in half, removing the semi-circle center, and adding holes at each end. To save time for our activity, we had all of our crowns pre-cut; all the participants had to do was decorate (using metallic paint, fake jewels, and foam pieces) and assemble.
Everyone had the chance to share their finished crown with the rest of the group. 