What To Do On a Snow Day? Craft!

Snow days are the best days for teachers. True, you’ll have to make them up on warmer day, but who cares?! Snow days are unexpected gifts. However, if you are anything like me, then you have to figure out what to do in order to avoid feeling stir-crazy! One of my favorite things to do is get crafty. So when my friend, and fellow teacher, and I saw that a blizzard was about to hit Monday night, we stopped by Hobby Lobby after work to store up on materials.

Our craft of choice? Clipboards. They are very handy teacher tools. Clipboards hold my lessons for the day, the roll sheet, the seating chart, the weird assembly schedule for the day that I know I won’t remember, and usually a stack of papers I am grading and shuffling. If you are a future teacher, get yourself a clipboard. A decorated clipboard is even better though.

Here are some basic materials you’ll need to decorate:

Modge Podge  and Foam Brushes: to protect with a clear layer of shellack whatever cutesy-ness you feel like putting on your board. We chose to keep it simple: scrapbooking paper and decorative scrapbooking embellishments. We chose embellishments that would lay flat and could be Mod Podge’d over for protection.

Putting the scrapbooking paper on the clipboard is simple, and we each chose separate ways. First paint a thin layer of Mod Podge on your board, then lay the paper on flat. My friend used an X-ACTO knife to fit the paper down to size, while I used a small sheet of paper and decorated the edges with a collage of small paper squares. I didn’t think I would be able to perfectly cut the paper to fit and then perfectly position it straight on the board, and any imperfections would have driven me crazy! So something purposely imprecise was what I needed.

After the large paper and any designs are glued down, paint several layers of Mod Podge over it, painting each layer in opposite directions, horizontal strokes and then vertical. After this, decorate with your embellishments then repeat the layers of Mod Podge again. At this stage you will want to flip your board over to start on the reverse side. Lay the board on some aluminum foil to avoid sticking. This is not a gluey project where newspaper should be used!

The end result of our project is this:

Front

Back

And then mine….

Front

Back

What My Students Think I Look Like

This was a gift from last year. I loved it so much that I saved it. The funny thing is, while this kid was mischievous, he was not bad and I truly enjoyed having him in my class! When he gave it to me, he made sure to describe everything in the drawing. “See that’s me. Cause you never call on me and you hate me. And that’s you there, see, I even drew the ruffles on your sweater. K, bye.”

I look quite lovely here. I especially like how my eyeballs are looking suspiciously to the corner of the page. Who am I watching? Do they deserve detention?

Ahh, and in this one I am second to the left…no wait. This is the cast of Jersey Shore! I confiscated (oh, yeah. I confiscate) this being drawn during class. You really can’t help but love it though. The student knows all of their names, but also does a fair job with body type too! Snookie is simply rendered with a backward S and fat cheeks. Ronnie has extra muscle lumps. And the always demure JWoww has boobies which shoot up and out like bottle rockets. Vinny seems kinda lame though. I guess he is the Chris Kirkpatrick of the group.