More Blooms on the Classroom Tree

Today I spent some extra time adding all of the extra blossoms to the classroom tree, and ended up with this:

While is doesn't match the trees outside that are currently covered in blossoms, it definitely gives the idea of spring blooms.

I ended up doing a lots of groupings around each branch.

It's amazing that even after putting up 19 strands of flowers I still want to add more, but this will have to do.  Soon enough it will be time to add leaves again, so I will leave the flowers alone for now.

The Butcher Paper Classroom Tree in Spring Bloom

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You can find ‘Making a Classroom Tree” here  and here, and “Decorating a Classroom Tree” here and here.

Well, believe it or not, we are seeing definite signs of spring here in California.  Just today I broke off a couple of twigs from trees and took them in the classroom to show the Little People how new leaves were coming out of the leaf buds.

With onset of spring in mind, I spent some time wandering in the Dollar Tree today trying to find a way to make our classroom tree look spring-ish.  I wanted it to have flowers (since it's supposed to be an apple tree, after all), but since I didn't give the tree flowers last year, I didn't have anything already planned or stored away for this look.

I went into the store thinking I might look at the bunches of artificial flowers with the goal of pulling the flowers off of the plastic stems and sewing them together on the sewing machine to make a flower garland.  However, it quickly became apparent that it would take a lot of bunches of flowers to make any significant amount of garland.

But then at the front of the store I saw them:  "Wedding" flower garlands

Each package had 12 feet of garland.  Each white flower was separated with what appears to be a piece of clear drinking straw.  Now that I think about it, this idea could easy to be replicated at home, but certainly not for the cost of a dollar.

 And certainly not for $.50 each, which is what they rung up for when I took my eight garlands up to the cash register.

After school I began to drape the flowers up on the tree.  I actually thought I got all eight strands on there, but then after I was finished I  found one more strand that I had not put up yet.  Then I went back to the Dollar Tree after school and bought 11 more strands. (I was a little worried that they had changed the price to a dollar in the three hours that I was away, but hooray, they had not.)

Here is the tree in the first stage of its spring look.  As you can see, seven garlands hardly made an impact on the tree at all, but adding 12 more tomorrow should do the trick.

I wasn't really sure how to string the flowers up so I just randomly tried a few methods as I went along.  However, after I was finished I could tell that I didn't like this "wraparound" method shown below...

...as much as the "group and clump" method shown here at the far end of these branches.

 So tomorrow I'll be doing lots of "grouping and clumping", which of course are highly technical tree-decorating terms.

As you can see in the picture above, the garlands did have other things on them.  They came as both flowers and holographic hearts, or holographic doves, but I went for the hearts.  I took them off the garland and then added them to the Valentine's creative art center that was a choice today:

Actually, I almost feel like just the cool silver hearts were worth the $.50 alone.  I think I'll take the ones that they don't use on their art and put some of my blank yard sale address labels on them and put them in the writing center for Valentine's Day cards.

So, a tree's worth of apple blossoms, plus over 100 large holographic hearts to use for various purposes for only $9.50.   Not a bad deal at all.

The Classroom Tree

The tree is back up in my classroom, with a new and improved look.  I had to pull last year's tree down at the end of the year, but enjoyed it in the room so much that I wanted to put up another one this year.  Fortunately, I learned several things last year that I wanted to improve on,  which helped me improve on the tree design a bit. 

One thing I learned last year was the need to secure the tree "hole" better so that it didn't dip down into the trunk.  The hole is made from a flower pot secured to a big piece of folded cardboard.  Here's how it looks on the underneath all that paper:

This year I tied a piece of string on the back/bottom of the flower pot and secured it to the "roof" of cardboard above.  This hopefully will keep it from falling down in the trunk).

My friend Gay was unable to help me tree-build, but Jacob came along to help.  And the teacher from the morning class was there that day, as well.  The only problem was that I really didn't know how to tell them to help until I fumbled through the process by  myself.  And by the time I figured out how to do each part, each part was already done. 

You can find ‘Making a Classroom Tree” here  and here, and “Decorating a Classroom Tree” here and here.

I admit that I did despair a little bit during the building process, for a long moment losing hope that I had any tree-making ability in my at all.  I believe that was the stage where I was trying to hold up three or four random tree branches over my head that were splayed out like unconscious octopus legs while trying to attach them to the wall.  But then I pulled it together.  Whew.

I did do something different for the leaves this year.  Last year I just made leaves out of butcher paper, and then we added hand print leaves and other things as the year went on, as you can see here:

This year I bought some shiny, sparkly fabric and decided to make fabric leaves:

My original thought was that I would use the die cut machine at the Teacher Center to cut them all out, but this proved to by way too time-consuming, since you could only cut out two leaves at a time without the die cut machine making strange cracking sounds.  (And believe me, that ladies that work there frown on that.)

So instead I brought them home and cut leaf shapes out with scissors, since I could layer them and cut them  seven or eight at a time.  I then decided they needed a little shaping, so I ran each leaf through my sewing machine to put a little tuck in the top of each one.  After that, I layered the leaves into groups of three and ran them through the machine again without cutting the thread, resulting in long chains of leaves.  (Yes, I know.  I am a glutton for huge, time consuming tasks like this.)  Then I could attach them to the tree in long pieces, giving the tree more leaf coverage:

Finally, I added some animals to the tree.  Right now I have a raccoon, a couple of birds, and this monkey.

So that is Phase One of the tree this year.  Phase Two will be to add apples, and then we'll move on to Fall Leaves (Phase Three).  You might have noticed that I bought fabric for fall-colored leaves as well, but I will need some more time before I have the energy to even consider taking on that sewing task again.   

The good news in that category is that leaves here don't even begin to change until around November, so there's plenty of time to rest up for Phase Three...and beyond.

The Leaves are Almost Ready!

Well, the fall leaves are almost ready to put on the Classroom Tree. Right now there are apples on it, but since we've been talking about fall a lot (and now that we can actually see signs of fall), it's time for the tree to transform.  Overnight.  Magically.

As you can see below, I have made tucks in all of the leaves to get them ready.  My plan is to layer them in groups of two or three and then run them through the sewing machine again.  However, I worry that doing that will dramatically lesson the length of  leaves I will have to  string on the branches - by about one-half to two-thirds, of course. 

Well, we shall see.  I might do that (layer them) anyway just to cover up the harshness of the bright yellow, which looks a little glaring to me even as I write this.

After I get them all strung (layered or not layered) I will post another picture.

Apples on the Tree

Here is how our Classroom Tree looked in its recent Apple Tree form:

And here is how it looks today:

I kind of wish I had more fall leaves to put on it, but that certainly doesn't mean that I'm going to run off and make some more.  Maybe I'll add to it next year.

The next step is the easiest - just take all the leaves off for winter.