Making a Native American Headband: Arts & Crafts Projects for Kids

Video Transcript

" Hi! I am Debbie with Expert Village.com and I’m here today to show you some really, really cool Native American costumes for your young crafter. This doesn’t have to be for Thanksgiving but I like to use it as Thanksgiving, as part of our learning, so today we are going to do some Indian headbands with feathers. Now while we are making this or before we make it, we do lots of reading of books of our Native American culture. Go to your craft store, get some of this Naga hide, pretty inexpensive, cut it in a strip, you’ll need some pretty good scissors, and before we get started on this, we read lots of books, and talk about how Indians communicated with each other and their form of communication of course was pictures. And many books on the market talked about the different tribes and how they communicated and what their symbols meant. We first go through and talk about what each symbols means. So I will give the kids a piece of paper that does have the symbols on it and then I will let them create a story and I tell them they have to tell me a story with their pictures. Of course, I model it first but this kind of helps them get some ideas what they want to do. The story begins here and goes around the headband. This is a young girl, who walks to the river, she gets in her canoe, she fishes, and she walks again. This time she is in the forest, she sees a deer; this just tells a story all the way around the headband. When the kids are creating theirs and I tell them you going to tell me a story that goes with this, so first I model, and then they go back and they start creating their own headband with the markers and I use permanent makers, it depends upon how comfortable you are with your child using permanent markers, tell them to take their time, make it neat, make it as neat story that they can tell their friends. Then they come over and I measure their head and staple. Be sure that you staple it so that the smooth side of the staple is next to the child’s hair, so it does not catch their hair and with your scissors in the middle of your staples cut some low slits, slide your feathers inside and then you have an authentic Indian headband for your young learner."