Thursday, April 7, 2011

April is showers, poetry & spring flowers!

After two months of brown tones, it was time to add some color to the display. We're having a Poetry Contest this month, so along with April showers and spring flowers, this was a fun idea to quickly throw together. I used MS Word's wonderful letter panels to create the POETRY part of the sign. To make the umbrella-looking shapes, I grabbed some bulletin board paper and made big squares first-- no measuring-- just fold over to make a triangle, cut the leftover off, and keep folding like you would a fan. Cut the corners off, scallop or leave them smooth to make it look like an umbrella. I open them up and draped some of them over the bars, and others I tape opened up. The next part was where I literally threw the display together.
I raided the recycle bin in the paper room and pulled out all of the discarded bulletin board paper, tore them into pieces, wadded them up, and threw them on the floor. When one of my fellow teachers came through and asked me what I was doing with all that paper, I told him I was getting out my frustrations. He believed me, so then I told him they're supposed to look like wildflowers. I'm afraid some folks will only see wadded up paper.
I had fun with it, though. I scattered some baskets around filled with colored grass and added poetry books to the display, and it was done. So wadded up paper or wildflowers, it's April's display.



Remember the Alamo!


March always seems to slip in and slip out before I realize it, and especially Texas' Independence Day on March 2nd. This time I used the backdrop for February's display and hung a quickly drawn and cut-out cardboard Alamo from under the loftbed. I used the "stagecoach" font for the sign and tore the edges. To give it a burned look, run a black marker aroun the edge, and then a layer of brown color pencil. Pull books on the Alamo or Texas history and you're done! Sorry I didn't get this out before March was over.