We started The Rag Coat today which is about a girl who lives in the Appalachian Mountains.  Her father works in the coal mines and eventually dies from “miner’s cough”.  The family is poor so the girl, Minna, does not have a coat to wear to school (she goes to school for the first time around age 9).  Her mother and her mother’s friends quilt her a coat out of scraps from other sewing projects.  Minna loves that each piece has a story to it (baby’s blanket, etc) and shares these stories with her classmates.

I printed out the first template here and ripped up some construction paper for rags.  Doo colored the picture and glued the scraps onto the coat to make her own rag coat.