To complete a unit on fashion, you will need lots of fabric that your homeschool kids can use in the clothing design game. Check your closet for old scraps you may already own and then check fabric stores and thrift stores for additional material to add to your stash. You will also need a sewing machine, thread, bobbins, scissors, tape measures, pins and Velcro. Make sure that you have graph paper that the kids can use to sketch out their designs, along with colored pencils and fashion magazines to get ideas for designing their clothes.
You will need at least four homeschool kids to set up the clothing design game. If you have more than one child, you may be able to set up the game without any additional children. If you do not have more than one child at home, then you can check with your local homeschool association or group and coordinate with other parents who are interested in participating in the clothing design game unit. Your children can get together at set times to work together.
The clothing design game will require someone to be the clothing designer, someone to be the manufacturing company, someone to be the retail store and someone to be the customer. If you have more than four kids, pair the kids up so they can work in teams.
Have the kids look over the fashion magazines and pick out fashions they are interested in. They might also look for ideas on television, the Internet or at the mall. Have the designer think about which clothing designs would be most enjoyable to create, the manufacturing company think about which designs would be best suited to the manufacturing process, the retail store think about which designs would sell best, and the customer think about which designs she would most like to buy and how much she would be willing to pay. Get the kids together to share their ideas before they get to work.
Have the clothing designer draw a sketch of the clothing designs she wants to create. She should choose at least three different designs so that there are options at the retail store. Once the sketches of the clothing are completed, they should be brought to the manufacturing company. The child at the manufacturing company should choose fabrics from your stash of material and begin cutting out pieces and sewing them together. If the designs for clothing are complicated, you might look at the local fabric store for ready-made patterns that might simplify the process. Once the clothing is finished, it goes to the retail store, where they are displayed on hangers so that the customer can buy them. You might choose to allow the kids to use play money or money from a board game so they can have a realistic shopping experience.
Once the garments have gone from the design phase all the way to the consumer phase, get the kids together to talk about what they have learned from the clothing design game. Encourage them to share what went well, what didn't go well and what they want to change the next time around. Following the reflection phase, have the children repeat the game process, changing roles, until all children have had the opportunity to be in the role of designer, manufacturer, retailer and customer. This will have your homeschool kids playing the clothing design game four times and changing things after each reflection period based on what they have learned. To finish things up, each child should write a report of an age-appropriate length to share their experiences in the clothing design game.