By Jenny Neyman
Photo by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Weekly Wild Wolf students in Shaya Straw’s class at Soldotna Elementary School show off the hats Straw made. By the end of the school year she will make a hat for each of her students. Clockwise from bottom are Austin Adlam, Marissa Griffin, Tyler Johnson, Nate Downs, Josh Pieh and Crystle Tapia.
Redoubt Reporter
Shaya Straw, a third-grade teacher at Soldotna Elementary School, spends her workdays trying to fill her students’ heads with math skills, vocabulary, science concepts, proper spelling, good behavior and the like.
“It’s great. They’re a fun age. They’re still excited about learning and seeing new things and not too cool for school,” Straw said.
When she embarked on her teaching career, Straw decided she would not only strive to fill those heads, but keep them insulated, too, and began a project hand-making a winter hat for each and every one of her students. Now in her fourth year teaching, she’s got 21 hats to make this year, and is nearing her 100th hat overall.
“It’s fun. It’s a hobby I enjoy, and I like to bring it into the classroom as my way of giving them something from me,” Straw said. “I’ve made hats for my whole family, and friends, and I sell them at the Birch Tree Gallery, but this takes over priority of my hat-making during the school year.”
Straw and her husband moved to Soldotna from an area not requiring much in the way of warm winter gear — Flagstaff, Ariz.
“I could use a little bit of Arizona weather right about now,” she joked last week, as the central Kenai Peninsula was in the grips of a prolonged minus subzero cold snap.
Her husband is a carpenter. Straw had been working as an adviser in a study-abroad program at Northern Arizona University, where she got her teaching degree.
“We came on vacation one time and my husband loves fishing and I like fishing so we kind of loved it and just decided, ‘Hey, let’s go on an adventure,’” Straw said of their decision to move to Alaska four years ago.
Her third-grade class at Soldotna Elementary is her first teaching position, and she went into it with enthusiasm to make the experience as special for her students as for herself. She created the Weekly Wild Wolf program — the wolf being the school’s mascot — whereby she chooses a student to be the highlighted star of the class each week, rotating until everyone in the class gets a turn being the Wild Wolf for the week.
“It’s not a reward for behavior or anything, it’s just their chance to shine for the week,” Straw said.
Students can choose to bring something special to share with the class — recent visitors have been a frog and a
Photo by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter Soldotna Elementary third-grade teacher Shaya Straw poses with one of her Weekly Wild Wolf students, Olivia Davis, in some of her crocheted hats.
hamster. They also get their very own winter hat, made special just for them by their teacher.
“It’s something they can look forward to. They know they get it on the Friday of their week, and all the other kids go, ‘Oh, that’s such a nice hat!’ So they get attention from their peers, as well,” Straw said.
She had learned to crochet during a study-abroad trip to Australia in 2001. Soon after moving to Soldotna she discovered Birch Tree Gallery on Funny River Road, and the owner, Kathleen Logan, suggested Straw make hats for her students as part of the Weekly Wild Wolf program.
“I thought, ‘Oh, well, that could be fun.’ So I started making them for each kid that year. I had noticed that some of the kids didn’t have winter hats and I thought, ‘Hello, this is Alaska. We need hats.’ And after that I just kept doing it every year,” Straw said.
Crocheting each soft, fuzzy, pull-on cap takes about two hours, usually completed while watching a movie. They come out being a consistent design, though not through adherence to any pattern.
“People ask me, ‘How do you do it? Do you have a pattern?’ And I don’t. I just know how to make hats, that’s the only thing I can really make. I can’t even explain how to make them. I’ve taught a few people how to make them but I’ve never written down a pattern because I don’t really know how to read a pattern,” Straw said.
At the start of each school year as Straw starts getting to know her students, she takes note of each kid’s favorite colors and the colors of their outdoor coats and boots so she can create a matching hat.
“I always try and make it the colors that the kid would like, the colors that make me think of them,” Straw said.
The result is a color-coded calling card of all her students, present and past — because the kids keep wearing the hats even after their year with Straw is over.
“It’s kind of fun. I had never really thought about it when I started, but now looking back and through school or out on the playground the kids are still wearing them from three years ago and two years ago and last year. I can always tell who it is from across the playground because I know the hat. Or on the weekends I’ll see the kids sledding and I’ll be like, ‘Oh, there’s so-and-so,’” Straw said.
The kids seem to like them, she said.
No “seem” about it.
“I love my hat!” exclaimed Marissa Griffin, pulling her pink cap down to eyebrow level.
“Because it’s warm and soft,” added Crystle Tapia. “And Ms. Straw made it.”
Her classroom has had a visit by Ares, a search and rescue dog, and his handler, Dale Lawyer, to talk about the Lost in the Woods program for kids to stay safe and get found if they get lost outdoors. One of the things the kids are taught is to always wear a hat.
“All the kids were saying, ‘Oh, keeping our hats on! I have a hat to stay warm!’” Straw said.
With Straw’s hats, the challenge isn’t getting the kids to wear them, it’s more often getting them to take the hats off.
“They wear them all the time. They want to wear them in the class, even when it’s not cold in here,” Straw said. “Parents will say, ‘She wouldn’t take it off, she slept in it all weekend.’”
She hasn’t decided whether she plans to keep hat-making for her entire career. It is extra work and expense, as she buys the yarn herself. But so far, the hats are warming her heart every bit as much as her students’ heads.
“Teaching takes a lot of time even outside of working hours, so I’ll have to just kind of see. But I like doing it and I think more than anything it makes me happy to see the kids wearing them the next year and the year after that. Just the other day one of the kids said, ‘This hat fits my mom so it will fit me when I’m grown up.’ So it’s like, ‘Aw, they’re planning on keeping it forever,’” Straw said. “It’s just something special between me and each kid, and it makes me really happy to know that the kids like school.”
