Christmas crafts and decorations

Here are our Christmas projects for this year.  We put as many as we could up to decorate before sending them home for winter break.


Handprint Christmas Trees, laminated and bordered with decorative duct tape

snowflake picture frames with their pictures in them

shoe traced reindeer with hand print antlers

decorated Christmas Trees

Paper name chains in Christmas colors

Art Drying Rack

With a classroom this small, plus really young toddlers, it's a problem doing artwork because there isn't anywhere to lay something to dry that they can't get to and possibly make a bigger mess with.  So i solved the problem by making my own drying rack (thank you Pinterest for the idea!)

I called my local pizza place, explained I was a teacher and was hoping to buy several unused large pizza boxes from them for a project for the classroom.  They were very accomodating and let me have them for a great deal.  So I went and picked them up along with some more....you guessed it....DUCT TAPE!

Cut the front flaps off of all the boxes....

Stacked them....

made sure to tape the front edges so that it wouldn't be rough edges (plus just looked better)...

Then duct taped the entire thing together on ALL sides.  Made it pretty darn sturdy and really great looking. After i was done, i took plain blue duct tape and put small pieces on the front edges with each child's name, one per slot.  Makes it super easy to put something in really quick to get it out of the way of little hands without worrying about forgetting to put their name on it and mix it up with another child.  Plus I can just re-tape over the name whenever the new year starts for another child's name.

Transformation of a cabinet

Remember that ugly old metal storage cabinet in the back of one of the before pictures of my classroom?

Yeah, that's the one.  Not too pretty looking is it?  I didn't think so either.  Time to change that.  Lets just say I got a little too happy with the decorative duct tape I found.

Such a huge difference even a little makes!  But wait, there's coordinating duct tape for the border as well!

It's amazing how bright it makes the room!  So now not only is it nicer to look at (bring your sunglasses, lol), but it also doubles as my magnet board for the little ones to use.  Really happy with how it turned out.