Easy DIY Light Up Hanging Cloud Decorations

Hi everyone! You may or may not know that I love to do crafts. But I am not Martha Stewart by any stretch of the imagination. The crafts I love to do are simple and fun. They don't come out looking perfect, and may not be Pinterest-worthy, but they do tend to be pretty cool.

A while ago I decided to make my classroom have a sky theme. I love looking at the sky because there are always cool things up there, like rainbows and clouds and stars. Plus, so many inspirational quotes are based on the sky, like "The sky is the limit," and "Reach for the sky." Wait, no. I think that is what Woody from Toy Story says. "Reach for the stars!" That's better!

I was having trouble coming up with cool decorations for a sky themed classroom, and then I saw an idea on how to make hanging light-up cloud lights. I simplified the original idea until it was something even I could do. And now, I will show you! 

Just to let you know, I will mention a few brand names and even post a link to a product, but these are not sponsored links or anything. I'm just sharing what I used. You might know of a product that works better.

What you need: an empty pop bottle, some string, cotton or polyfill, duck tape, spray adhesive, and a string of battery operated lights.

I started by tying a string around an empty pop bottle, like so.

I added a little duck tape to keep the string from sliding around. I only had fireworks duck tape. It doesn't matter what sort of tape you use, because it is going to be covered up anyways.

Now it was time to start gluing the cotton onto the bottle. I experimented a little with this. I started out using regular Elmer's School Glue, by squirting some lines and dots onto the bottle and then sticking the cotton on. But I found that a more effective type of glue is spray adhesive. The kind I had was Elmer's Craft Bond.

I sprayed a small area of the bottle, and then stuck some cotton on.

I kept doing this, little by little, until the entire bottle was covered. I made sure the string was still hanging out, not getting stuck underneath all of the cotton, Then, I sprayed a layer of adhesive over the entire thing. This was to keep wads of cotton from falling off at inoportune times. It still might fall off, but the adhesive layer makes it a little sturdier.

The next step is the lights! I bought a set of Lings Moment Fairy Lights on Amazon. They are tiny white lights on a wire, and they are battery operated. I was able to loosely and randomly wrap the wire of lights around the fluffy cloud shape. I wrapped the battery compartment a few times around one of the wires, to keep it in place. I wanted it to stick out so that I'd be able to turn the light on and off easily, but I didn't want it hanging down too far.

To hang it, I simply put a 3M hook on the ceiling, and tied the other end of the string around it!

There you have it! Not exactly mindblowing, but quick, easy, and fun! I made four of these and I will probably make two more, since I have two more strings of lights.

The rest of my classroom is still a work in progress, but I can show you a few interesting areas, if you'd like. Remember, this is mostly a room where kids will take breaks and come to deescalate when they are upset, so I don't have a lot of academic stuff around.
This is the sensory box area. It will have more eventually, but right now it just has a sensory bin on a table, and some smaller sensory bins on the shelves. There is also a play-doh set and a box of fidgets.

Here is my little reading nook. In the academic room there are tons of leveled readers and stuff, but I wanted this to be just a relaxing area to kick back and  read. I found a bean bag chair, and I made another seat by tying a seat cushion to a milk crate. The big shelf is full of curriculum guides, so I covered it with a bed sheet. I'd like to fill the shelf up with kids' books. But this classroom used to be a storage room, and there is a bunch of junk in there that I have no idea what to do with, so I just cover it up.

Finally, here is what I call "The Cloud," following my sky theme. I bought a white duvet cover, and stuffed it with body pillows and some scrap foam I got for free at an upholstery store. It is just an area where kids can go when they are overwhelmed and need some quiet time.

That is my humble abode, everyone. I hope you like it!

Reach For The Stars

A few weeks ago I was having trouble even believing that l really did have a teaching job. Now it is becoming more real... I've gotten to read my kids' IEPs, and have been busy decorating my classroom and planning lessons.

Most of my readers are teachers, but those who aren't teachers might be surprised to learn that we have to use a lot of our own money to buy things we might need. The school supplies the basics... text books and tables and construction paper and stuff... but everything else, from classroom decorations to books to special supplies... we have to get ourselves. There is a finite amount that they will reimburse us for, but we are encouraged to spend that allotment on professional development.

So I was really happy that the people from "Get Childish" sent me a free set of The Glowers 2.0 to review. They are glow in the dark stars and planets that you can stick to your walls and ceiling. The description said that they would glow brighter and longer than other glow in the dark sets. My theme for my classroom is the sky, so stars fit right into my motif.

They came in the mail the other day, in a package that looked like this.

When I opened the box, here is what I found: A bag with tons of stars, and lots of sticky tack!

I started sticking them up on my ceiling right away. I have one of those ceilings with tiles that pop out easily, so I decided to stick the stars to the grid because I was afraid of touching the tiles. The first thing I noticed was that the stars seemed to stick really well. They didn't fall off after I stuck them up there.

After a while I tried shutting all the shades and turning off the lights. Unfortunately, the stars didn't start to glow. I think the main reason was because it was not really dark enough in the room. Even with the shades shut, sunlight was still able to get in through the narrow window on the door, keeping it from getting dark. I think I will bring some of the stars home and try them at night.

But that brings up another good quality. I've bought glow stars before, and usually they are very light colored, so that they cannot be seen at all during the day. I wanted my kids to be able to look up and see the stars, even during the day. I was glad that these stars are brightly colored, and can easily be enjoyed all of the time. I'm thinking of trying to find a way to hang some of them from strings from the ceiling.

I am going to finish decorating my classroom on Monday, just in time for Open House. I will post pictures of the whole thing then. I can't wait!

(#GetchildishGlowinthedarkstars)

You Know That Dream Where You're In School...

Do you ever have a dream where you're back in high school, or maybe elementary school even, and you suddenly realize you can't remember where any of your classes are? Maybe you lost your schedule, or you have it but when you look at it it makes no sense? I've had it a bunch of times, and other people have told me they've had versions of the same dream, so I guess it is not uncommon.

Today I felt like I was stuck in that dream!

Here is what happened. Today was my first day of new school year meetings at the new district I'll be teaching in. I had been sent several emails with the dates, times and locations of different meetings that will take place all this week. Today's meeting was supposed to be at the High School. I made sure to leave home early so I'd get there with plenty of time. I hate being the new person and having to walk in and find a seat in a sea of strangers, so my plan was that if I was one of the first people there, I'd have my choice of empty seats.

Just as planned, I arrived 15 minutes early at the high school, and found the room where the meeting was supposed to take place. But nobody was in there! Thinking I must be really early, I pulled out my phone to check my email in my spare time. I found that one of my new bosses had called me, and emailed me, saying that they hoped I was coming to the meeting. I replied to the email saying, "I'm at the room, but nobody is here. Did I get the info wrong?" I also tried calling her back, but it went to her office voicemail.

When there was no reply, I panicked. The name of the elementary school is similar to the high school, and although the info I had said "HS" pretty clearly, I thought maybe it didn't mean what I assumed it meant! So I left the high school, and drove to the elementary school. The doors were locked and the office was closed. Next, I drove to the district office. (This is a really small town, so all of these places are within about one minute driving distance from each other, luckily!) I went in and asked if the supervisor was around. I was told, "No, she's at a meeting." Trying not to get frustrated, I said that I was supposed to be at the meeting also, but that I'd gone to the room I was supposed to go to, and nobody had been there. The ladies in the district office assured me that the meeting was at the high school but that they did not know what room it was in.

Back to the high school I drove. This time I went into the office and asked someone there if they knew where the meeting was supposed to be. They told me it was in the room that I'd already been to. I walked down there again, just to make sure. Again, it was empty. I walked back to the office, at this point about ready to cry! It was half an hour past the meeting's start time!

The lady in the office spoke to someone else, and then said, "Oh, sorry, they changed the room number." She then walked me to the correct room, on the opposite side of the building, where the meeting was in full swing.

Doesn't it seem like someone would have notified me that the room was going to be different? Or put a sign on the door of the original room? And how did everyone else somehow know where they were supposed to be? My only theory is that, since most of the other people knew each other well already, the news had spread pretty quickly when the room number was changed. I, being out of the loop, didn't get the updates that everyone else did!

It was definitely not the first day I was hoping for. The rest of the meeting went okay, though. All of the people were very nice. But I hope I don't spend the rest of the school year frantically trying to figure out where I'm supposed to be!

8 Quick and SImple Classroom Carnival Games

Hi everyone! Our summer rec program has finally come to an end. I say "finally," but it feels like it went by extremely fast this year! I still can't believe it is over!

We usually go on field trips on Fridays, but for our last day of the program we had a carnival at the building instead. We have done that for the last few years... it is always a really nice, casual, fun day. We have a catered lunch for kids and staff, rent a few bouncy houses, and just party the day away!

I was so busy all summer that I pretty much had to whip up these carnival games at the last minute. I thought I'd show them to you, because a lot of the carnival game ideas I found online were really elaborate, things that looked cool but would take a lot of time, effort and money to put together, even for a backyard carnival party or something. But my carnival games were super simple, yet fun. They'd also be easy to turn into a "Carnival of Learning," which is something I used to do during the week of Independence Day when I taught ESY.

Here's what I had.

1. "Bozo Buckets." I came to the realization that most people who didn't grow up in Chicago don't have any idea what "Bozo Buckets" means. Since I grew up in Chicago but no longer live there, I had to explain this to a lot of people... you've probably played the game but called it something else. "The Bozo Show" was a kids' show that used to be on in the mornings, where they did a bunch of different skits and stuff. One of the things was Bozo Buckets, where two kids from the audience got picked to play. You had to start by throwing a ball into Bucket 1, and then Bucket 2, all the way up to the last bucket. If you missed a bucket, the game was over. For each bucket you got, you'd get a prize, and the prizes got progressively bigger until the "Grand Prize" which was in the last bucket.
My version was simplified. I only had four buckets, and the player could toss the ball into any bucket they wanted to. If the ball went in, the player won the number of tickets that was on the bucket! If you wanted to turn it into a learning game, you could write words or math problems on the ping pong balls and have the player read the word or solve the problem before they threw it.

2. Ring Toss.  I made rings out of glow sticks. I usually use a plunger as a target, but I couldn't find it this year. The one I have was bought new for the purpose of the game, and I decorated it so it looked more like a festive game and less like something meant to unclog toilets. Since I couldn't find it, I just used a roll of cling wrap. It worked quite well! The player threw the four rings, and however many rings they got around the target, that was how many tickets they got.

3. Jokers Are Wild, which was really just a bunch of playing cards taped face-down to a poster board. Players had to take a random card. If it was a Joker, they got 5 tickets. Any other card was 1 ticket.

4. Ball Toss. This just involved tossing balls into holes. The smaller the hole, the more tickets the player won!

5. Airplane Throw. Here we have a fun game, the object of which was to toss a paper airplane through the ring. You could use a hula hoop as a ring, but since our gym equipment had already been packed up, I just twisted a pool noodle into a circle and duct taped the ends together. This game is trickier than you might think. My airplanes kept going over the fence! To win a ticket you had to get it through the hoop.  To make it more fun, you could have the kids make their own paper airplanes to throw through.

6. Pick a Duck. I wrote numbers on the bottoms of the rubber ducks. The players had to randomly choose a duck, and win that number of tickets. Unfortunately the Oriental Trading Co. ducks I had kept tipping over. The Dollar Tree ducks had better luck.

7. Stone Drop. This game involved dropping a stone into a bin of water, with the hope of getting it to land inside a tiny cup at the bottom of the bin. Harder than it sounds!

8. Sucker Tree. This was a popular one! The players would choose a sucker, and if the bottom of the stick was colored green, they got a ticket. But if not, they still got a sucker out of the deal, which was why they enjoyed this game so much!

I was also going to have a water balloon basketball toss, but I ran out of time. I'll have to save that idea for next year.

Anyways, the kids got to turn in their tickets for prizes, just like at the arcade. I only had two categories of prizes... the bigger prizes were 10 tickets, and the smaller prizes were 5. Of course you could make it more complicalted by having more levels of prizes, so kids would have to spend more time figuring out what they could "afford."

Anyway, that is the end of our carnival, and the end of our summer rec program! Next week I start training for my teaching position. I can't wait! I'm still going to try to enjoy whatever is left of the summer, though!

'Tis a Gift To Be Simple

Sometimes, I tend to get a little too into things. When I plan an activity, I want the children to have everything. I just want to give them the best. So, I go overboard. That isn't necessarily a bad thing... because it isn't bad to want the kids to be happy and have fun at the rec program! But it can turn into a lot of work, which results in me being exhausted, and also leaves me more disappointed and discouraged if things don't work out exactly the way I hoped.

Here is a great example. Last year, we had a Bubble Day at the rec program. I wanted it to be the best Bubble Day ever! So I scoured the Internet and found every single Bubble Day idea I could find.

And then I tried to do them all. Inside, I had playdough that was made out of bath soap, a craft where kids could make their own bubble wands, and another craft where kids could make a "bubble trumpet" out of a wash cloth, an empty bottle, and a rubberband. Outside, we had lots of different stations where kids could blow bubbles using different household objects, try standing inside a giant bubble made with a hula hoop and a swimming pool full of bubble solution, and an area where they could test different types of bubble solutions. It was a lot of fun, and everyone enjoyed it... especially the little boy who jumped into the pool full of bubble solution with all his clothes on and used it as a giant bubble bath. He had bubbles in his hair and on his cheeks and chin,, and a big smile on his face!

This year, one of my co-leaders was in charge of Bubble Day. She kept it simple. She picked up a new bubble machine (ours didn't work so well last year) and a bunch of those long, thin tubes of bubbles with the giant bubble wands inside. I brought out my iPod and speakers. The kids played for an hour! They ran around with the bubble wands, they danced in front of the bubble machine, and they all laughed and had fun. Even the kids who rarely participate in activities came and enjoyed it. One boy, who spends most of his time at the rec program either crying or staring into space, was dancing and laughing and jumping up and down!

Nobody complained that there weren't lots of different stations for them to move through, or that there wasn't bubble dough inside, In fact, I think they had a better time than they did for last year's Bubble Day!

As the summer comes to an end, I want to do so much for the kids. I want them to have scrapbooks commemorating every single moment they spent at the program, every single smile and touching moment and silly antic. I want to give them a last week that they will never forget. I want it to be perfect. And I have to try and remind myself that sometimes, "just enough" turns out to be perfect after all! '

Rainforest Week

Our summer recreation program is coming to an end... this coming week will be our last. We had Rainforest Week. We were a little short staffed and so I didn't get the chance to take many pictures, but I can still tell you what we did. We had some exciting things this week!

On Tuesday, we had a local guy come in who does a reptile show. He brought several lizards, frogs and snakes, and brought them around for each kid to look at and pet (if they wanted to.) The kids who came to it were amazed and loved it...It was awesome to see big smiles on the faces of some of the kids who usually aren't very engaged in the activities. One girl who is afraid of everything actually petted every reptile, while exclaiming, "I'm brave, right?" One of the best things about our rec program is when we're able to see kids stretch out of their comfort zones and try new things... especially when they actually find out that they enjoy the new things they try!

Meanwhile, in PE, I'd put together another obstacle course, since the Astronaut Training Course from last week was so popular. I took a narrow cardboard box that one of our utility fans had been packed in, cut out some bat shapes from black paper, added string to the bats, and taped the strings to the "ceiling" of the box so that they hung down like they were flying. The kids had to crawl through the "bat cave" as one obstacle. I laid down a blue gym mat and dropped some long, rubbery, bendy fidget sticks onto it, so they had to jump over the snake pit. I piled up all of our parachutes, and the kids had to swim through crocodile infested waters. I put out a bunch of polydots and dropped bean bags around them, and the kids had to hop from stone to stone to avoid the pirahnas. I taped four pool noodles to the ground, two by two, and the kids had to walk across the "narrow bridge." My co-leader made a big poster of a monkey's face with an open mouth, which we attached to our small basketball hoop, so the kids had to toss crumpled paper "fruit" into the monkey's mouth. The obstacles were pretty similar to last week, but with a new theme. The kids really enjoyed it. They seem to like activities that are more or less self-directed, rather than team games.

On our Cooking day, the kids made monkey cookies. My co-leader made large sugar cookies. The kids spread chocolate frosting over them and then attached vanilla wafers as ears and a muzzle, and used tubes of black icing to draw eyes, nostrils and a mouth.

The kids also made rainforest terrariums. I bought plastic jars from the Dollar Tree, and got some Rainforest Animal Toobs from Amazon. The kids had to fill the jar with a scoop of aquarium gravel, a scoop of activated charcoal (also called activated carbon, and available at Wal-Mart in the fish supply section), and several scoops of potting soil. They then added a succulent plant clipping, and chose a Rainforest Toob animal. Finally they sprayed water onto it. I made each step a station for them to go through at their own pace. I didn't get to see the results, because I was running our other activity for the day.

Our other activity was something I put a ton of planning into, and it turned out to be a pretty popular activity, It was called "Sights, Tastes and Smells of the Rainforest." The easiest step was to print out lots of pictures of rainforest animals, along with their names.

I also got a set of mini snack containers from Dollar Tree. In each one I put a spice that came from the rainforest. We had Vanilla, Coconut, Cinnamon, Tumeric, Nutmeg, Allspice, black pepper, chili pepper, cayenne pepper, ginger, cloves, and paprika. I printed off a small picture of each spice and glued it to the lid of the correct container.

The last part was the best. I picked up a bunch of foods (mostly fruits) that come from the rainforest, and put them out on plates for kids to try. We had pineapple, oranges, avocados, papaya, lemons, and dragonfruit, as well as some tapioca pudding and sections of a Hershey bar.

Each picture, scent and food had an index card taped in front of it. Each kid got a strip of smiley face stickers, and they were supposed to put a sticker on their favorite picture, their favorite smell, and their favorite food. That was a way that we voted on our favorites! I was not really surprised that chocolate was the favorite of most of the kids, although some also chose pineapple and oranges. Nobody even tried the tapioca. I don't know why people don't like tapioca! I ended up eating it all myself!

I had also planned on playing a soundtrack of the rainforest on my computer, but it was too chaotic right before the activity, and I ended up not getting the computer. But I don't think anyone minded.

It was sort of an exhausting week! But we sure had a lot of fun!

Then Again, Maybe I Don't

"I really love the summer rec program! I wish it could go all year!" Those were my ironic closing words from my last post. 

Don't get me wrong... I still do feel that way... but when I wrote that it was on Friday evening when I was feeling light-hearted about the upcoming weekend stretching in front of me. How fast Monday comes! And today was not a good Monday. 

The day started off with me getting up early so I could go to see my supervisor and get this week's list of children participating in the program. Some kids sign up for the whole summer, and others sign up by the week, so every week we may or may not have new kids. It would be awesome if we could get the week-by-week list for the whole summer ahead of time, but some families wait until Sunday night to sign their kids up for the week that starts on Monday morning, apparently. So each Monday someone has to drive down and get the list. Why doesn't the supervisor just email me the list each week? I HAVE NO IDEA, REALLY!

I got all the way there, only to have the supervisor tell me, she had sent the list to our building via one of our staff members... but she didn't remember who she gave it to. So I had to go back to our building, where of course the list was no where to be found. Who did she send it with? We never found out. I asked all of the staff members but nobody had even seen our supervisor on Friday, let alone gotten a list from her. We had to call her and ask her to email the list, which she took her time about doing, and by the time we got the list there was only a few minutes before the kids would arrive. Each kid in our program gets a 1:1 mentor, and the big problem was, we like to have the mentors already matched with the kids before they arrive on Monday morning, so they can go out and meet the parents and the child and start the week out right. But without knowing who was coming, it was impossible to get things ready ahead of time. We were scrambling... only to realize, just as the kids were arriving, that we were short-staffed. My co-leader and I each had to be in charge of a kid for the morning. And usually, I'd enjoy spending some 1:1 time with one of our children... except I usually use the first hour or so in the morning to prepare all of the activities for the day and make name labels for the new kids. By 2 hours into the day, I had gotten nothing done, and it was time for our morning circle. Of course I hadn't gotten Greeting Meeting prepared at all because I'd had to be 1:1 with a child, so everything was in disarray. But we carried on. I skipped half of our Meeting activities because half of the kids were screaming by the end of the first ten minutes. 

Immediately after Greeting Meeting, I had to run a music group. Usually another one of my co-leaders does it, but she was out. It isn't very hard... we have a CD with a bunch of movement songs, and it just involves playing the CD and doing the activities and dances with the kids. It is actually a lot of fun. Except... our large CD player was broken and wouldn't play. We have a smaller CD player but the speakers are really quiet, so the kids could barely hear the music, so most of them were just sitting in their seats looking oddly at me as I tried to encourage them to do the music activities. Then the CD started skipping badly. Luckily children with special needs are really good at dealing with sudden changes and disruptions in their daily routine, so they were not bothered at all when I tried to improvise... 

Do you believe me? (I hope not, because I'm lying.) 

I eventually solved the problem by getting our laptop, hooking up it's portable speakers, and playing the CD on it. It still skipped a little, but we managed to get through Music at least. 

The next hour went okay, as I was working with my co-leader on planning our upcoming field trip. But then three of our staff members came in, towing a 10-year-old along with them. We have a few staff members... pretty much the same ones I mentioned in this post... that are frequently getting into power struggles with kids. We really encourage natural consequences, Love and Logic, and that sort of thing... but these staff members still, no matter what, end up getting in situations where they feel like the goal is to force the child to obey, or else the child "wins." 

So now we have this 10-year-old, Tobias, who is energetic but has never really showed serious behavior problems during the rec program. Yet here he is being hauled into the Calm Down Room, where he pretty much implodes. He's spitting and hitting and screaming, and these two staff members are in his face saying, "That's not nice. If you do that again you're going to lose (insert random activity here.)" 

We suggested, and then insisted, that the two staff members take a break from Tobias and let us take over. Usually when a kid is losing control, our tactic is to tell him we need him to have a safe body, and then calmly wait him out. We don't have an actual time-out room with a door, so we have to physically stay in the room with him to keep him from running off. This means we end up taking a lot of punches and other abuse. And you have to try really hard not to show any reaction, because that can make things escalate fast. You have to completely disengage, keep your face blank, and just try to step out of the way or block his punches. Of course some punches get through. And Tobias, apparently, likes to spit. So despite my best efforts, I ended up getting some loogies right in my face... and just calmly wiping them away. 

Usually when the child starts to calm down... because when they're imploding like that you almost just have to keep them safe and ride it out until they're able to hear you and process things... we will start doing things like helping them name their emotion and identify the level, try to talk them through some calming down steps, get them to talk about what happened to trigger it, problem solve to remedy the situation in some way, and eventually get them back into the flow of their day. But this time, that simmering-down process just wasn't coming. Tobias kept coming with the punches and the screams and the kicks and the spit wads and the projectiles (which, luckily at least, were just pillows) and seemed to be trying to get a reaction from us, willing us to fight back. This went on all the way up until it was time for the parents to pick the children up. Meanwhile, other staff members had cheerfully taken over the activities that I was supposed to be running at that time. 

Finally the day was over, Tobias's mom came, the other children's parents came, and things were calm. I felt like crying. Not really about Tobias, specifically, because all that is par for the course, but just about how the rest of the day had gone. The thing with the participant list and the thing with music and being understaffed and a bunch of other random, small things that had occurred throughout the day. 

I must have looked spent, because one staff member came up to me and said, "You did a great job today, Angel," and another staff member randomly came up and hugged me and said, "Thanks for everything." Because, aside from a few people who really bug me, I really do work with the most amazing people. They are kind and patient and flexible. And as I thought about this, I realized...

"I really love the summer rec program! I wish it could go all year!"